Anxiety

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 Blue Nights (2011)

  Long hours now spent waiting for the scans, waiting for the EEGs, sitting in frigid waiting rooms turning the pages of The Wall Street Journal and AARP The Magazine and Neurology Today and the alumnae magazines of the Columbia and Cornell medical schools. Sitting in frigid waiting rooms once again producing the insurance cards, once again explaining why, the provider’s preference notwithstanding, the Writers Guild-Industry Health Plan needs to be the primary and Medicare the secondary, not, despite my age—my age is now an issue in every waiting room—vice versa. Sitting in frigid waiting rooms once again filling out the New York–Presbyterian questionnaires. Sitting in frigid waiting rooms once again listing the medications and the symptoms and the descriptions and dates of previous hospitalizations: just make up the dates, just take a guess and stand by it, for some reason “1982” always comes to mind, well, fine, “1982” it is, “1982” will have to do , there can be no way to get the answer to this question right. Sitting in frigid waiting rooms trying to think of the name and telephone number of the person I want notified in case of emergency. Whole days now spent on this one question, this question with no possible answer: who do I want notified in case of emergency? I think it over. I do not want even to consider “in case of emergency.” Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else. I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not. I mean, think back: what about that business with the folding metal chair in the rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street? What exactly was I afraid of there? What did I fear in that rehearsal room if not an “emergency”? Or what about walking home after an early dinner on Third Avenue and waking up in a pool of blood on my own bedroom floor? Might not waking up in a pool of blood on my own bedroom floor qualify as an “emergency”? All right. Accepted. “In case of emergency” could apply. Who to notify. I try harder. Still, no name comes to mind. I could give the name of my brother, but my brother lives three thousand miles from what might be defined in New York as an emergency. I could give Griffin’s name, but Griffin is shooting a picture. Griffin is on location. Griffin is sitting in the dining room of one or another Hilton Inn—a few too many people at the table, a little too much noise—and Griffin is not picking up his cell.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  There were no other houses or stores around it, just a parking lot and some taut fir trees that looked like they had been brushed. My mother waited for me in the car. She smiled, took out a crossword puzzle and focused her eyes on it, the smile still gripping her face. The lawyer was a short man with dark, shiny eyes and dense immobile shoulders. He took my hand with an indifferent aggressive snatch. It felt like he could have put his hand through my rib cage, grabbed my heart, squeezed it a little to see how it felt, then let go. “Come into my office,” he said. We sat down and he fixed his eyes on me. “It’s not much of a job,” he said. “I have a paralegal who does research and leg-work, and the proofreading gets done at an agency. All I need is a presentable typist who can get to work on time and answer the phone.” “I can do that,” I said. “It’s very dull work,” he said. “I like dull work.” He stared at me, his eyes becoming hooded in thought. “There’s something about you,” he said. “You’re closed up, you’re tight. You’re like a wall.” “I know.” My answer surprised him and his eyes lost their hoods. He tilted his head back and looked at me, his shiny eyes bared again. “Do you ever loosen up?” The corners of my mouth jerked, smilelike. “I don’t know.” My palms sweated. — His secretary, who was leaving, called me the next day and said that he wanted to hire me. Her voice was serene, flat and utterly devoid of inflection. “That typing course really paid off,” said my father. “You made a good investment.” He wandered in and out of the dining room in pleased agitation, holding his glass of beer. “A law office could be a fascinating place.” He arched his chin and scratched his throat. Donna even came downstairs and made popcorn and put it in a big yellow bowl on the table for everybody to eat. She ate lazily, her large hand dawdling in the bowl. “It could be okay. Interesting people could come in. Even though that lawyer’s probably an asshole.” My mother sat quietly, pleased with her role in the job-finding project, pinching clusters of popcorn in her fingers and popping them into her mouth. That night I put my new work clothes on a chair and looked at them. A brown skirt, a beige blouse. I was attracted to the bland ugliness, but I didn’t know how long that would last. I looked at their gray shapes in the night-light and then rolled over toward the dark corner of my bed. My family’s enthusiasm made me feel sarcastic about the job—about any effort to do anything, in fact. In light of their enthusiasm, the only intelligent course of action seemed to be immobility and rudeness.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Perhaps twenty per cent of the force was steady; the rest was driftwood. The steady ones drove the new ones away. The steady ones earned forty to fifty dollars a week, sometimes sixty or seventy-five, sometimes as much as a hundred dollars a week, which is to say that they earned far more than the clerks and often more than their own managers. As for the new ones, they found it difficult to earn ten dollars a week. Some of them worked an hour and quit, often throwing a batch of telegrams in the garbage can or down the sewer. And whenever they quit they wanted their pay immediately, which was impossible, because in the complicated bookkeeping which ruled no one could say what a messenger had earned until at least ten days later. In the beginning I invited the applicant to sit down beside me and I explained everything to him in detail. I did that until I lost my voice. Soon I learned to save my strength for the grilling that was necessary. In the first place, every other boy was a born liar, if not a crook to boot. Many of them had already been hired and fired a number of times. Some found it an excellent way to find another job, because their duty brought them to hundreds of offices which normally they would never have set foot in. Fortunately McGovern, the old trusty who guarded the door and handed out the application blanks, had a camera eye. And then there were the big ledgers behind me, in which there was a record of every applicant who had ever passed through the mill. The ledgers were very much like a police record; they were full of red ink marks, signifying this or that delinquency. To judge from the evidence I was in a tough spot. Every other name involved a theft, a fraud, a brawl, or dementia or perversion or idiocy. “Be careful—so-and-so is an epileptic!” “Don’t hire this man—he’s a nigger!” “Watch out—X has been in Dannemora—or else in Sing Sing.” If I had been a stickler for etiquette nobody would ever have been hired. I had to learn quickly, and not from the records or from those about me, but from experience. There were a thousand and one details by which to judge an applicant: I had to take them all in at once, and quickly, because in one short day, even if you are as fast as Jack Robinson, you can only hire so many and no more. And no matter how many I hired it was never enough. The next day it would begin all over again. Some I knew would last only a day, but I had to hire them just the same. The system was wrong from start to finish, but it was not my place to criticize the system. It was mine to hire and fire.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She noticed a piece of bright orange pizza stuck between his teeth, and it endeared him to her. They left the pizza stand. He walked with wide steps, and his heavy black overcoat swung rakishly, she thought, above his boots. He was a slight, slender boy with a pale, narrow face and blond hair that wisped across one brow. In the big coat he looked like the young pet of a budding secret police force. She thought he was beautiful. He hailed a cab and directed the driver to the airport. He looked at her sitting beside him. “This is going to be a disaster,” he said. “I’ll probably wind up leaving you there and coming back alone.” “I hope not,” she said. “I don’t have any money. If you left me there, I wouldn’t be able to get back by myself.” “That’s too bad. Because I might.” He watched her face for a reaction. It showed discomfort and excitement and something that he could only qualify as foolishness, as if she had just dropped a tray full of glasses in public. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “But I like the idea that I could.” “So do I.” She was terribly distressed. She wanted to throw her arms around him. He thought: There is something wrong. Her passivity was pleasing, as was her silence and her willingness to place herself in his hands. But he sensed another element present in her that he could not define and did not like. Her tightly folded hands were nervous and repulsive. Her public posture was brittle, not pliant. There was a rigidity that if cracked would yield nothing. He was disconcerted to realize that he didn’t know if he could crack it anyway. He began to feel uncomfortable. Perhaps the weekend would be a disaster. — They arrived at the airport an hour early. They went to a bar and drank. The bar was an open-ended cube with a red neon sign that said “Cocktails.” There was no sense of shelter in it. The furniture was spindly and exposed, and there were no doors to protect you from the sight of dazed, unattractive passengers wandering through the airport with their luggage. She ordered a Bloody Mary. “I can’t believe you ordered that,” he said. “Why not?” “Because I want a bloody Beth.” He gave her a look that made her think of a neurotic dog with its tongue hanging out, waiting to bite someone. “Oh,” she said. He offered her a cigarette. “I don’t smoke,” she said. “I told you twice.” “Well, you should start.” They sat quietly and drank for several minutes. “Do you like to look at people?” she asked. She was clearly struggling to talk to him.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  330The History of Christianity II suggested that Pentecostal revival encourages a Protestant work ethic, motivation, and discipline; for example, many of these churches tell their members to avoid drugs and alcohol. õDaniel Olukoya, the Nigerian prosperity preacher, is an interesting case: He believes in demons and witches, but he also has a Ph.D. in molecular genetics. When he started his church in 1989, he was working at the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research. The fact that he has a Ph.D. in genetics but trusts the Holy Spirit to heal gives his ministry even more credibility in the eyes of his followers. He is turning the authority of Western modernity on its head. õA British scholar named Paul Gifford has spent a long time studying Olukoya, and unlike Martin and Berger, he says that Pentecostal prosperity preaching is no force of modernization or political empowerment. Olukoya’s message robs people of control; it tells people to be distrustful of everyone but the church, and that the key to success in life is not to work hard, but to pray and give Olukoya lots of money. From this point of view, there is no Protestant work ethic. CONCLUSION õThe controversy over Aladura churches like Olukoya’s has spread around the world. These churches have been in Britain since the 1960s, established by Nigerians who went there to work and study, and they spread to other European countries in the 1970s. For years, African churches have been sending missionaries to help build congregations in Europe. õThese congregations tend to be more ethnically diverse than the ones back home, mixing African immigrants from many different backgrounds. They came to Europe with the hope of landing a good job, eventually paying for their extended family to come too. But the reality of immigrant life is never so rosy as the fantasy. 331Lecture 33—Prophetic Religion in Modern Africa õWhen things get hard—when immigrants struggle to find work, or their children start acting out—the theology of spiritual warfare can be a seductive tool for survival in this totally alien, secular culture. The church may tell them that Satan is behind a deportation order, or that their unruly nine-year-old has become possessed by a demon— and for a hefty fee, church elders can take that child away and perform an exorcism. õWestern authorities have struggled to stop the child abuse that happens under the guise of these “exorcisms,” while also battling the tendency of the Western media to sensationalize these stories and play into racist stereotypes of African immigrant religion as a primitive and violent sort of sorcery. SUGGESTED READING Gifford, Christianity, Development, and Modernity in Africa. Hastings, A History of African Christianity. Jenkins, The Next Christendom. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äWhy might the Aladura movement have appealed to Nigerians in the 1920s? äWhy did government officials in the Belgian Congo respond to a nonviolent religious movement with violent suppression? äWhy has the prosperity gospel become a worldwide movement, while so many Christians denounce it as a heresy?

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  198The History of Christianity II õHeyrick wrote a pamphlet in 1824 called Immediate, not Gradual Abolition, and that title gives a pretty clear idea of when she thought slavery should end. Wilberforce thought this view was dangerous—he thought a gradual approach was best—and told his colleagues not to get involved with women’s anti-slavery societies because they were too radical and inappropriate. But Heyrick’s writing had a big inf luence on the American abolitionist most famous for demanding an immediate end to slavery, William Lloyd Garrison. CHRISTIAN REFORM õBy the early 19 th century, the abolitionist movement was only one of a host of social reform movements swirling through North American and European societies at this time. Other movements included the temperance movement, the Sunday School movement, and the exploding missionary movement, which combined a desire to spread the gospel around the world with the goal of “civilizing” non-Christian societies and introducing them to Western education, technology, and social norms. õThis desire to reform the world was exploding at the same time that evangelical revivals were sweeping Britain and North America. Charles Grandison Finney, perhaps the greatest evangelist of the revival movement that historians call the Second Great Awakening, was also one of America’s leading abolitionists. õWomen were everywhere in these movements. Women made up a disproportionate number of regular churchgoers: In the 19 th century, women generally accounted for 55 to 70 percent of the total number going to church in America. 199Lecture 20—Christian Missions and Moral Reform õMany women devoted themselves to church-based volunteer work, abolitionist societies, Sunday School campaigns, tract societies, and moral reform groups like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). This last was founded in Ohio in 1874 to promote abstinence from alcohol. õFive years after the founding of the WCTU, a Methodist woman named Frances Willard became president, and remained in the position until her death in 1898. She was an ambitious feminist who expanded the mission of the organization to include lobbying for the eight-hour workday, prison reform, women’s suffrage, and women’s rights around the globe, although temperance always remained at the center. õWithin a decade, the WCTU had grown into an international organization that dispatched female missionaries to preach the gospel of temperance and moral purity in Australia, Italy, and even Japan and India. They recruited local women to take up the cause; for example, an Indian woman named Pandita Ramabai traveled around India stumping for temperance, and founded a college for Indian widows. GENDER AND CULTURE IN THE MISSION FIELD õThe missionary life was a seductive calling for many Protestant women in the 19 th century. Between 1861 and 1894, women founded women’s missionary societies in 33 denominations as well as 17 societies devoted to evangelizing within the borders of the U.S. õInitially, most churches had rules against single women going abroad as missionaries, so women would go abroad with their husbands. Most churches also thought it was inappropriate for women to do aggressive evangelization, so women’s societies and female missionaries focused

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The house was quiet. The only sound he heard was George breathing heavily in the other room; soon he could hear him snoring. Charlie had been slowly stroking his mother’s hair, desperately hoping that she would open her eyes. The blood from her head had saturated the towel and was spreading onto Charlie’s pants. Charlie thought his mother might be dying or was maybe even already dead. He had to call an ambulance. He stood up, flooded with anxiety, and cautiously made his way to the bedroom. Charlie saw George on the bed asleep and felt a surge of hatred for this man. He had never liked him, never understood why his mother had let him live with them. George didn’t like Charlie, either; he was rarely friendly to the boy. Even when he wasn’t drunk, George seemed angry all the time. His mother had told Charlie that George could be sweet, but Charlie never saw any of that. Charlie knew that George’s first wife and child had been killed in a car accident and that was why Charlie’s mom said he drank so much. In the eighteen months that George lived with them, it seemed to Charlie that there had been nothing but violence, loud arguments, pushing and shoving, threats, and turmoil. His mother had stopped smiling the way she used to; she’d become nervous and jumpy, and now, he thought, she’s on the kitchen floor, dead. Charlie walked to the dresser against the back wall of the bedroom to reach the phone. He had called 911 a year earlier, after George had hit his mom, but she had directed him to do so and told him what to say. When he reached the phone, he wasn’t sure why he didn’t just pick up the receiver. He could never really explain why he opened the dresser drawer instead, put his hand under the folded white T-shirts his mom had laundered, and felt for the handgun he knew George kept hidden there. He’d found it there when George had said Charlie could wear an Auburn University T-shirt someone had given him. It was way too small for George and way too big for Charlie, but he’d been grateful to have it; it had been one of George’s few kind gestures. This time he didn’t pull his hand back in fear as he had before. He picked up the gun. He’d never fired a gun before, but he knew he could do it. George was now snoring rhythmically. Charlie walked over to the bed, his arms stretched out, pointing the gun at George’s head. As Charlie hovered over him, the snoring stopped. The room grew very, very quiet. And that’s when Charlie pulled the trigger. The sound of the bullet firing was much louder than Charlie had expected. The gun jerked and pushed Charlie a step back; he almost lost his balance and fell. He looked at George and squeezed his eyes closed; it was horrible.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Once we got home I ran her a hot bubble bath. I went into the bedroom to tell her it was ready, but she’d already fallen asleep. I wasn’t tired. I woke her up around 6:00 P.M. to eat dinner. I’d made her favorite meal, but she just kind of picked at it with her fork. “You OK?” I asked her. “Yeah, sure,” she answered, just like I would have. “You coming to the bar after work?” She was quiet for a minute. “Can I meet you at home? [’m just so tired.” I instantly grew sullen because I was scared. “What’s wrong with meeting me at the bar?” “Can we talk about this another time?” she asked me. “Yeah, sure,” I said. That night I packed her a lunch with the little red hearts on the bag. She picked it up and smiled—at the bag, not at me. I felt strange the next morning when the other women came to work to meet their butches. As each person asked me where Milli was I grew more defensive and anery. Milli and I fought about it that morning. “Did it ever occur to you that I might be uncomfortable at the bar?” Milli shouted. That had never occurred to me at all. “Why?” I asked, puzzled. “Because there’s attitude toward us.” “What are you talking about? Lots of the women at the bar are pros.” I was aware I was shouting and I wished I would stop. Stone Butch Blues W1 “They're hometown girls who turn tricks to pay the rent. They’re ashamed of what they do. They aren't into the life in the same way as the rest of us. We're different.” I had never thought about it. I was reeling. “Get it, baby? That’s your people, not mine.” Her ice-cold tone chilled me. “My people are the women I dance with. That’s who watches my back.” Milli always was a pro’s pro. I grabbed my leather jacket and took the bike far outside the city limits before I pulled off the road and sat down to think. The rest of the week we were super-polite to each other around the apartment. I couldn’t get Milli to respond to me. She wouldn’t play. “I don’t know,” I told Edwin. “I’m used to being the one who shuts down.” “Give her time,” Ed said. “You both just need time.” Sunday morning I was almost asleep when Milli came in. She was in the bathroom for a long time before I realized something was wrong, She turned her face away when I came to the bathroom door. I sat down on the tile floor. “You OK?” I asked her. “Yeah, baby. Go to sleep.” After a few minutes I got her to look at me. Her 18 = Leslie Feinberg

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

  One day, I don’t know how, but I plucked up the courage to ask Zaheera for her phone number, which was a big deal back then because it wasn’t like cellphone numbers where everybody has everyone’s number for texting and everything. This was the landline. To her house. Where her parents might answer. We were talking one afternoon at school and I asked, “Can I get your phone number? Maybe I can call you and we can talk at home sometime.” She said yes, and my mind exploded. What???!!!! A girl is giving me her phone number???!!! This is insane!!! What do I do??!! I was so nervous. I’ll never forget her telling me the digits one by one as I wrote them down, trying to keep my hand from shaking. We said goodbye and went our separate ways to class, and I was like, Okay, Trevor. Play it cool. Don’t call her right away. I called her that night. At seven. She’d given me her number at two. That was me being cool. Dude, don’t call her at five. That’s too obvious. Call her at seven. I phoned her house that night. Her mom answered. I said, “May I speak to Zaheera, please?” Her mom called her, and she came to the phone and we talked. For like an hour. After that we started talking more, at school, on the phone. I never told her how I felt. Never made a move. Nothing. I was always too scared. Zaheera and Gary broke up. Then they got back together. Then they broke up. Then they got back together. They kissed once, but she didn’t like it, so they never kissed again. Then they broke up for real. I bided my time through it all. I watched Popular Gary go down in flames, and I was still the good friend. Yep, the plan is working. Matric dance, here we come. Only two and a half years to go… Then we had the mid-year school holidays. The day we came back, Zaheera wasn’t at school. Then she wasn’t at school the next day. Then she wasn’t at school the day after that. Eventually I went and tracked down Johanna on the quad. “Hey, where’s Zaheera?” I said. “She hasn’t been around for a while. Is she sick?” “No,” she said. “Didn’t anyone tell you? She left the school. She doesn’t go here anymore.” “What?” “Yeah, she left.” My first thought was, Wow, okay. That’s news. I should give her a call to catch up. “What school did she move to?” I asked. “She didn’t. Her dad got a job in America. During the break they moved there. They’ve emigrated.” “What?” “Yeah. She’s gone. She was such a good friend, too. I’m really sad. Are you as sad as I am?” “Uh…yeah,” I said, still trying to process everything. “I liked Zaheera. She was really cool.”

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  As her hand ran up my thigh, I froze. “I’m sorry, baby, it’s OK,” she reassured me. I rolled over and she came into my arms. “Usually it’s me that reacts like that,” she said. “It’s strange. It’s like being on the other side of the looking glass, you know?” I didn’t, but I could feel myself drift irresistibly toward sleep. “Sleep now, baby,’ Angie cooed in my ear. “You're safe here.” “Angie,” I asked her as I slipped into sleep, “will you be here when I wake up?” “Sleep now, baby,” she answered. Stone Butch Blues 77 IT WAS TIME TO FIND a factory job. The butches urged me to try to get into steel or auto. Of course I already knew that. I wasn’t a damn fool. The strength of the unions in those heavy industries had won livable wages and decent benefits. But Edwin said there was mote to it than that. The trade unions safeguarded job security. She told me that unlike a nonunion shop if she had a run-in with a jerk on the plant floor, it didn’t signal her last day on the job. You couldn’t be fired just because some foreman didn’t like your face. With union protection, all the butches agreed, a he-she could catve out a niche, and begin earning valuable seniority. In the meantime, while I was waiting for an opening, I had to work through the temporary labor agencies at minimum wage. In early autumn the agency sent me to a one-day job on the loading docks of a frozen food plant. My heart leaped when I saw Grant walking into the factory ahead of me. I caught up to her and shook her hand. Unloading trucks on the docks was male turf. It meant a lot to have another butch watch your back. Grant dug her gloved hands deep inside the pockets of her blue Navy coat. “Brrr,” she shivered. “I’m freezin’ my ass off out here, let’s get inside.” Then she sauntered very slowly toward the loading docks. She never hurried. She was so cool. One of the truckers shouted, “He-shes at high noon!” Several guys peered out from inside the plant and shook their heads in disgust. It was going to be a long shift. I was glad we walked slowly, like we owned the goddamn parking lot. We climbed up on the dock. The foreman came out to look us over. Grant took off her glove and extended her hand. At first the foreman looked like he wasn’t going to shake her hand, but he did. What little respect Grant got, she earned. The afternoon was waning, The sun dipped low in the winter sky. A brutal wind blew off the frozen lake. The huge semi we were unloading served to block the wind, but not the cold. I shivered. We were told we would unload two of these long, long trucks during the shift. We both nodded. Personally, I had my doubts.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Darlene told us later that a family on their way to church found us. They got some people to help get us to their home nearby. They didn’t take us to the hospital because they didn’t know if we were in trouble with the law or not. When Edwin came to, she gave them Darlene’s number. Darlene and her friends came and got us. Darlene took care of both of us at their apartment for a week before Ed or I were really coherent. “Where’s Ed, is she OK?” was the first thing I remember asking Darlene. “That’s the first thing she asked me—how you were,” Darlene answered. “Alive. You’te both alive, you stupid motherfuckers.” Neither of us ever saw an emergency room doctor for fear they’d call the cops to see if we were in any trouble. When Ed and I could sit up and even walk a little, we began recuperating in the living room together during the days while Darlene slept. The couch opened up as a bed. Ed gave me The Ballot and the Bullet by Malcolm X. She encouraged me to read W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. But we each had a headache so bad we could hardly read the newspaper. All day long we lay next to each other and watched television: “Get Smart,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,’ “Green Acres.” We healed in spite of it. Ed got disability pay during her absence. I lost my job as a printer. When Ed and I finally showed up at the Malibou a month later, someone pulled the plug on the jukebox and everyone rushed up to hug us. “No, wait, gently,’ we shouted, both backing up toward the door. “Notice the resemblance?” I asked, as Ed and I put out faces near each other. We had matching gashes overt our right eyebrows. Speaking for myself, I lost a lot of confidence after that beating. The pain in my rib cage reminded me with every breath how vulnerable I really was. I propped myself up at a back table and watched Stone Butch Blues 59 all my friends dancing together. It felt good to be back home. Peaches sat down next to me, draped her arm around my shoulders, and planted a long sweet kiss on my cheek. Cookie offered me a job as a bouncer on the weekends. I held my ribs and winced. She said I could wait on tables until I healed, if I wanted to. I sure needed the money. I watched Justine, a stunning drag queen, going from table to table with an empty Maxwell House coffee can, collecting money. She came over to the table where Peaches and I were sitting and began counting out the bills. “You don’t have to contribute, darlin’.” “What’s it for?” I asked. “For your new suit,” she answered, and continued counting the bills. “Whose new suit?”

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

  The next step would be for the parents to persuade Bruce to talk to me. I was worried about whether they could. The Moonies do a very thorough job of convincing people that former members are satanic and that even being in their presence could be dangerous.3 I mentally reviewed the possibilities. There were a number of ways things could go badly: Bruce could refuse to meet with me, or meet with me and walk away before we had enough time. He could later tell the Moonies his parents asked him to meet with me, in which case he might be whisked away and given deep phobias about Satan working through his family. He would have come to believe what I believed while I was a Moonie. I was programmed to fear my family and cut off personal contact for over a year. For the moment, then, all I could do was wait. The next morning I was interviewed for a television show on cults, something I do frequently all over the country. After the taping, I canceled all my appointments for the day. Bruce’s parents called from the Boston airport. They were about to leave for their son’s house. We reviewed our strategy one more time. I crossed my fingers. Two hours later the phone rang. They had managed to bring Bruce to a Chinese restaurant not far from my house. Bruce had agreed to meet me. I grabbed whatever I thought I might need to show him—file folders, photocopies of articles, and books—and threw them into the car and drove to the restaurant. When I arrived and met the family, the parents’ faces were full of worry and concern. Bruce tried to smile at first and shook my hand. But it was clear to me that he was thinking, “Can I trust this guy? Who is he?” I sat down in the booth with them. I asked Bruce about himself and why he thought his parents were so concerned that they flew from Minneapolis. Within an hour, after asking him enough questions to get a good handle on his state of mind, I decided to “go for it.” “Did they tell you about pledge service yet?” I asked. He shook his head and looked surprised. “What’s that?” “Oh, that’s a very important ceremony members do every Sunday morning, on the first day of every month, and on four holy days the group observes,” I started. “Members bow three times with their face touching the floor before an altar with Sun Myung Moon’s picture on it and recite a six-point pledge to be faithful to God, to Moon, and to the fatherland—Korea.” “You’re kidding!”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She stepped into a flower store. The store was clean and white, except for a few smudges on the linoleum floor. Homosexuals with low voices stood behind the counter. Arranged stalks bearing absurd blossoms protruded from sedate round vases and bristled in the aisles. She had a paroxysm of fantasy. He held her, helpless and swooning, in his arms. They were supported by a soft ball of puffy blue stuff. Thornless roses surrounded their heads. His gaze penetrated her so thoroughly, it was as though he had thrust his hand into her chest and begun feeling her ribs one by one. This was all right with her. “I have never met anyone I felt this way about,” he said. “I love you.” He made her do things she’d never done before, and then they went for a walk and looked at the new tulips that were bound to have grown up somewhere. None of this felt stupid or corny, but she knew that it was. Miserably, she tried to gain a sense of proportion. She stared at the flowers. They were an agony of bright, organized beauty. She couldn’t help it. She wanted to give him flowers. She wanted to be with him in a room full of flowers. She visualized herself standing in front of him, bearing a handful of blameless flowers trapped in the ugly pastel paper the florist would staple around them. The vision was brutally embarrassing, too much so to stay in her mind for more than seconds. She stepped out of the flower store. He was not there. Her anxiety approached despair. They were supposed to spend the weekend together. He stood in a cheap pizza stand across the street, eating a greasy slice and watching her as she stood on the corner. Her anxiety was visible to him. It was at once disconcerting and weirdly attractive. Her appearance otherwise was not pleasing. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why this was. Perhaps it was the suggestion of meekness in her dress, of a desire to be inconspicuous, or worse, of plain thoughtlessness about how clothes looked on her.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “Hi,” she said, bobbing her head. She turned to Bernard and rolled her eyes as she walked him to the door, knowing that he would enjoy this open display of contempt. “See you soon,” he said. He held her against him for a second, and she experienced a disorienting sense of comfort and safety that made walking back into the invading stares of her prospective boyfriends almost voluptuously exposing. She stood before them, and the canned laughter sounded once more. — That night she went to a group show at a small gallery in Soho that included work by her friend Sandra. As usual, she was one of the few non-artists there. Sandra, nervous and carefully chic in a bright blue pillbox hat and a long black velvet skirt, introduced her as “my friend Stephanie, who writes for The Village Voice.” This impressed people, even when Stephanie said, “I just wrote one thing for the Voice and that was a year and a half ago.” “Yes, but you look like a writer for The Village Voice,” said a painter. “That sounds like an insult to me.” “It’s not an insult, but it’s not a compliment either.” He barked out a laugh. Stephanie attached herself to another conversation about the embarrassing failure of an art gallery that she had never heard of, which, after a rapid shift of participants, became a discussion about somebody’s review in the Times versus somebody’s review in the Voice. Sandra rapidly crossed and recrossed the floor, darting in and out of conversations with apparent pleasure and animation. “Nobody’s here,” she hissed finally, near the hors d’oeuvres, even though there were dozens of people present. Stephanie wandered from conversation to conversation, having an almost panicky feeling that although there were nice, interesting people in the room, the situation, for all its seeming friendliness and ease, precluded her from connecting with the nice and interesting aspects of them. She tried to figure out why this was and could not, beyond the sense that the conversations around her were opening and closing according to the subtle but definite rules that no one had told her about. Then she saw Dara, Sandra’s other non-artist friend, standing regally alone. Dara was trying to become a fashion designer, and she looked unusually beautiful that night in a strapless satin dress that was dramatically faded in the middle where someone had probably spilled something on it a long time ago. Stephanie had always admired Dara, even though she was not friendly and had once been very rude to Stephanie on the phone. But Dara seemed pleased to see her and hung on to her presence throughout a shockingly dull conversation that stumbled awkwardly through Sandra’s work, Sandra’s husband’s work, a writer Stephanie liked and a movie. Still, Stephanie resolutely held on to her idea of Dara as an interesting person. She said, “You seem like someone who is at home in the world.”

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I nodded. Ed came up behind me and slid her arm across my shoulder. “Happy birthday, buddy.” I wrapped my atm around her waist and pulled her close. 150 = Leslie Feinberg “Hey,” Grant shouted at us. “You're all standing in front of the refrigerator. What do I have to do to get a beer around here?” “You have to give me a hug,” I demanded. “Oh, c’mere,” she laughed and put her arm around me. “Now gimme a beer.” I could hear the sound of Tammy Wynette’s voice singing “Stand By Your Man.” I found Theresa in the living room and reached out my hand to her. Her body settled against mine. We moved together to the music. She ran her fingers through the back of my hair. I pulled her close, asking her body for comfort. She gave it to me. Her arms felt like the only safe haven on earth. “Baby,” she whispered, “are you OK?” “Yeah,” I answered. “I’m alright.” “Hi, honey,” Theresa stood in the kitchen doot. I crossed my arms. “Dinnet’s ruined.” Theresa came toward me with her arms extended. I ducked them. “Where were your” “Oh, baby,’ Theresa kissed my neck. “You forgot I was going to that meeting tonight after work, didn’t you?” “What meeting?” I pouted. “You still trying to fight your way into feminist meetings?” That hit home, as was intended. “No, it was to raise support for the Indians at Wounded Knee. I would have thought you’d be sympathetic to that.” Theresa scored a direct hit. She softened her tone. “Still no work, baby?” I shook my head. “Nothing. I never thought the jobs would dry up for this long. My unemployment runs out in five more weeks.” Theresa nodded and stroked my hair. “We’ll manage.” “Not if you keep ruining the dinners ’'m cooking you. See if I slave over a hot stove for you anymore.” “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” she whispered. “It'll be OK. You'll get a job soon, you'll see.” She was wrong. By 1973 it seemed as though everyone we knew was laid off. Theresa lost her job at the university. That dashed our hopes of taking a vacation together—and we sure needed it. The months of me scouring for work and money getting tighter were taking their toll on us. We had to get away, but all our escape routes seemed blocked. “T don’t even want to go on vacation,” I told Theresa. “Are you crazy” she shouted. “We’re gonna go nuts if we don’t get out of here. We never go out, we never do anything.” I slumped at the kitchen table. “It’s getting too scary out there, Theresa. It feels like it’s getting worse. I hate to even go outside anymore.” Theresa sat down at the kitchen table. “You're depressed, that’s all. That’s just another reason why we need to get away from here.” I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. “I’m telling you, it’s getting worse out there.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Everybody would go out in the hall during the break to get coffee or candy from the machines. The girls would stand in groups and talk, and the two male typists would walk slowly up and down the corridor with round shoulders, holding their Styrofoam cups and looking into the bright slits of light in the business class doors as they passed by. I would go to the big picture window that looked out onto the parking lot and stare at the streetlights shining on the hoods of the cars. After class, I’d come home and put my books on the dining room table among the leftover dinner things: balled-up napkins, glasses of water, a dish of green beans sitting on a pot holder. My father’s plate would always be there, with gnawed bones and hot pepper on it. He would be in the living room in his pajama top with a dish of ice cream in his lap and his hair on end. “How many words a minute did you type tonight?” he’d ask. It wasn’t an unreasonable question, but the predictable and agitated delivery of it was annoying. It reflected his way of hoarding silly details and his obsessive fear I would meet my sister’s fate. She’d had a job at a home for retarded people for the past eight years. She wore jeans and a long army coat to work every day. When she came home, she went up to her room and lay in bed. Every now and then she would come down and joke around or watch TV, but not much. Mother would drive me around to look for jobs. First we would go through ads in the paper, drawing black circles, marking X’s. The defaced newspaper sat on the dining room table in a gray fold and we argued. “I’m not friendly and I’m not personable. I’m not going to answer an ad for somebody like that. It would be stupid.” “You can be friendly. And you are personable when you aren’t busy putting yourself down.” “I’m not putting myself down. You just want to think that I am so you can have something to talk about.” “You’re backing yourself into a corner, Debby.” “Oh, shit.” I picked up a candy wrapper and began pinching it together in an ugly way. My hands were red and rough. It didn’t matter how much lotion I used. “Come on, we’re getting started on the wrong foot.” “Shut up.” My mother crossed her legs. “Well,” she said. She picked up the “Living” section of the paper and cracked it into position. She tilted her head back and dropped her eyelids. Her upper lip became hostile as she read. She picked up her green teacup and drank. “I’m dependable. I could answer an ad for somebody dependable.” “You are that.” — We wound up in the car.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I mention it because for a moment, just while I was studying a juicy ass, I had a relapse. I almost went into a trance again. I was thinking, Christ help me, that maybe I ought to beat it and go home and begin the book. A terrifying thought! Once I spent a whole evening sitting in a chair and saw nothing and heard nothing. I must have written a good-sized book before I woke up. Better not to sit down. Better to keep circulating. Henry, what you ought to do is to come here some time with a lot of dough and just see how far it’ll take you. I mean a hundred or two hundred bucks, and spend it like water and say yes to everything. The haughty looking one with the statuesque figure, I bet she’d squirm like an eel if her palm were well greased. Supposing she said—twenty bucks! and you could say Sure! Supposing you could say—Listen, I’ve got a car downstairs . . . let’s run down to Atlantic City for a few days. Henry, there ain’t no car and there ain’t no twenty bucks. Don’t sit down . . . keep moving. At the rail which fences off the floor I stand and watch them sailing around. This is no harmless recreation . . . this is serious business. At each end of the floor there is a sign reading “No Improper Dancing Allowed.” Well and good. No harm in placing a sign at each end of the floor. In Pompeii they probably hung a phallus up. This is the American way. It means the same thing. I mustn’t think about Pompeii or I’ll be sitting down and writing a book again. Keep moving, Henry. Keep your mind on the music. I keep struggling to imagine what a lovely time I would have if I had the price of a string of tickets, but the more I struggle the more I slip back. Finally I’m standing knee deep in the lava beds and the gas is choking me. It wasn’t the lava that killed the Pompeians, it was the poison gas that precipitated the eruption. That’s how the lava caught them in such queer poses, with their pants down, as it were. If suddenly all New York were caught that way—what a museum it would make! My friend MacGregor standing at the sink scrubbing his cock . . . the abortionists on the East Side caught red-handed . . . the nuns lying in bed and masturbating one another . . . the auctioneer with an alarm clock in his hand . . . the telephone girls at the switchboard . . . J. P. Morganana sitting on the toilet bowl placidly wiping his ass . . . dicks with rubber hoses giving the third degree . . . strippers giving the last strip and tease. . . . Standing knee deep in the lava beds and my eyes choked with sperm: J.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  200The History of Christianity II more on social services, like setting up schools and hospitals. But it turns out that cultural restrictions on the so-called women’s sphere was sometimes an advantage. õTake the example of China: Mission schools and hospitals in China provided great opportunities for female teachers, nurses, and doctors, because only women were permitted to teach female students or examine female patients. They could take on responsibilities in China that would have been reserved for men in North America and Europe. õHowever, stories of women’s relative independence in the mission field began to alarm male church authorities, who were very anxious that their church operations were being taken over by women. They were concerned that instead of being a tough and masculine religion, Protestantism was becoming weak and feminine. õThe passage of the 19 th Amendment in the United States, granting women the right to vote, did not really help women in the churches. It made men even more anxious about gender roles and prompted them to reassess how much power they had permitted women to have. 201Lecture 20—Christian Missions and Moral Reform õIn the 1920s and 1930s, many churches that had been allowing women to train as missionaries and run missionary societies cracked down. The churches took over their organizations, consolidating women’s societies within their general mission boards and absorbing women’s training schools into their bigger church schools. õYet decades later, in the 1970s, progressive evangelicals would challenge some of the assumptions that had taken hold of late-20 th -century American evangelicalism. They would argue that evangelicalism had once been allied to very progressive causes. They used the stories like the ones from this lecture to point out that in churches where women were supposed to be meek and mild, some of the bravest heroes of the gospel had been women. SUGGESTED READING Metaxas, Amazing Grace. Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations. Swallow Prior, Fierce Convictions. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äWhat are the qualities of a successful missionary? Have these changed over time? äHow were Christian missionaries both allies and enemies of the slave trade? äHow did Christian theology and culture both constrain and empower women in the 19 th century? 202 LECTURE 21 THE CHURCH’S ENCOUNTER WITH MODERN LEARNING T his lecture digs into the story of the modern university, 19 th -century science, and their impact on the history of Christianity. It starts in Germany, then takes forks over to the British Isles and North America to consider two new ideas that rocked the Christian world: modern biblical scholarship and the theory of evolution. This is the chapter of Western intellectual history that gave us the research university as we know it today, and it also spawned many of today’s battles between faith and reason.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Ed and I were completely isolated. I wanted to leave. It was too painful. After a few minutes Alice came over to us, like an emissary. I felt bad that she had to play diplomat at a time when her grief was so unbearable, but I knew the butches were too angry to speak to us. I stood as she approached our table. I took her hand; she kissed my cheek. “The old butches are pretty mad at you two,” she explained gently. “Some of them feel like you spoiled it. See, they figured if they could make such a sacrifice to say goodbye to Ro, you young ones could, too. It’s not your fault, really. But you two better keep a low profile for a while, if you know what I mean.” Alice’s anguish was so discernible that I ached to reach out and hold her, but she wouldn’t have let me. I understood. It was easy for me to feel strong, to give of myself, dressed the way I was. For the butches who were watching us from across the diner, it had been painful and hard. Alice kissed my cheek lightly. “It'll blow over, you'll see,” she whispered. I hoped she was right. Stone Butch Blues 125 I figured I'd take Alice’s advice and lay low for a week or two, until I got some sign it was alright to appear at the bar again. But weeks of exile passed without a single phone call that would signal the ice had thawed. Mornings grew chilly. Autumn was in the air. There weren’t many jobs. The temp agency sent me to the cannery at Four Corners. It was an unpaid two- hour tide each way. I boarded the company bus at 4:45 A.M. It was cold and damp. Someone passed a bottle of whiskey around. I reached for the bottle and drank as I looked out the window. “Hey,” I heard Butch Jan’s voice growl, “are you gonna share that, or what?” She was kneeling on the seat in front of me. I held my breath. Jan leaned forward and grabbed a handful of my jacket. “Do you get it yet?” she demanded. Her face contorted with shifting emotions. I nodded. “Yes, I think I understood right away. I just didn’t know what to do. ’m sorry. I’m so sorry I messed it up for all of you to say goodbye to Ro.” Jan let go of my jacket and smoothed the leather. “Ah, it wasn’t your fault,” she said. “The next day at the burial the family made us stay one hundred yards away from the grave. That wasn’t your fault either.” 126 = Leslie Feinberg I leaned closer to her. “Listen, Jan,” I whispered, “T’m sorry about everything, you know what I mean?” We both knew I had shifted the conversation to the night Jan saw Edna and I dancing together. “It wasn’t like you think, really.”

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

  I got pulled over in Hillbrow. Cops in South Africa don’t give you a reason when they pull you over. Cops pull you over because they’re cops and they have the power to pull you over; it’s as simple as that. I used to watch American movies where cops would pull people over and say, “You didn’t signal” or “Your taillight’s out.” I’d always wonder, Why do American cops bother lying? One thing I appreciate about South Africa is that we have not yet refined the system to the point where we feel the need to lie. “Do you know why I pulled you over?” “Because you’re a policeman and I’m a black person?” “That’s correct. License and registration, please.” When the cop pulled me over, it was one of those situations where I wanted to say, “Hey, I know you guys are racially profiling me!” But I couldn’t argue the case because I was, at that moment, actually breaking the law. The cop walked up to my window, asked me the standard cop questions. Where are you going? Is this your car? Whose car is this? I couldn’t answer. I completely froze. Being young, funnily enough, I was more worried about getting in trouble with my parents than with the law. I’d had run-ins with the cops in Alexandra, in Soweto, but it was always more about the circumstance: a party getting shut down, a raid on a minibus. The law was all around me, but it had never come down on me, Trevor, specifically. And when you haven’t had much experience with the law, the law appears rational—cops are dicks for the most part, but you also recognize that they’re doing a job. Your parents, on the other hand, are not rational at all. They have served as judge, jury, and executioner for your entire childhood, and it feels like they give you a life sentence for every misdemeanor. In that moment, when I should have been scared of the cop, all I was thinking was Shit shit shit; I’m in so much trouble when I get home. The cop called in the number-plate registration and discovered that it didn’t match the car. Now he was really on my case. “This car is not in your name! What’s going on with these plates?! Step out of the vehicle!” It was only then that I realized: Ohhhhh, shit. Now I’m in real trouble. I stepped out of the car, and he put the cuffs on me and told me I was being arrested on suspicion of driving a stolen vehicle. He took me in, and the car was impounded.