Desire

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 Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I must admit that certain indiscreet stories whispered in my ear by my mistresses served to awaken in me some sympathy for these much mocked and little understood spouses. Such liaisons, agreeable enough when the women were expert in love, became truly moving when these women were beautiful. It was a study of the arts for me; I came to know statues, and to appreciate at close range a Cnidian Venus or a Leda trembling under the weight of the swan. It was the world of Tibullus and Propertius: a melancholy, an ardor somewhat feigned but intoxicating as a melody in the Phrygian mode, kisses on back stairways, scarves floating across a breast, departures at dawn, and wreaths of flowers left on doorsteps. I knew almost nothing of these women; the part of their lives which they conceded to me was narrowly confined between two half-opened doors; their love, of which they never ceased talking, seemed to me sometimes as light as one of their garlands; it was like a fashionable jewel, or a fragile and costly fillet, and I suspected them of putting on their passion with their necklaces and their rouge. My own life was not less mysterious to them; they hardly desired to know it, preferring to dream vaguely, and mistakenly, about it; I came to understand that the spirit of the game demanded these perpetual disguises, these exaggerated avowals and complaints, this pleasure sometimes simulated and sometimes concealed, these meetings contrived like the figures of a dance. Even in our quarrels they expected a conventional response from me, and the weeping beauty would wring her hands as if on the stage. I have often thought that men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself: they delight in fingers reddened with henna, in perfumes rubbed on the skin, and in the thousand devices which enhance that beauty and sometimes fabricate it entirely. These tender idols differed in every respect from the tall females of the barbarians, or from our grave and heavy peasant women; they were born from the golden volutes of great cities, from the vats of the dyers or the baths' damp vapor, like Venus from the foam of Greek seas. They seemed hardly separable from the feverish sweetness of certain evenings in Antioch, from the excited stir of mornings in Rome, from the famous names which they bore, or from that luxury amid which their last secret was to show themselves nude, but never without ornament. I should have desired more: to see the human creature unadorned, alone with herself as she indeed must have been at least sometimes, in illness or after the death of a first-born child, or when a wrinkle began to show in her mirror. A man who reads, reflects, or plans belongs to his species rather than to his sex; in his best moments he rises even above the human.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The concert hall gave on an inner court where some water lilies were growing in the fountain's basin; they lay wide open in the almost furious heat of a late August afternoon. During an interlude, Pancrates urged us to inspect more closely these flowers of rare type, red as blood, which bloomed only at the end of summer. At once we recognized our scarlet lilies of the oasis of Ammon; Pancrates was suddenly fired by the thought of the wounded beast expiring among the flowers. He proposed to me that he versify this episode of our hunt; the lion's blood would be represented as tinting the lilies. The formula is not new: I nevertheless gave him the commission. This Pancrates, who was completely the court poet, improvised on the spot a few pleasant verses in Antinous' honor: the rose, the hyacinth, and the celandine were valued less in his hexameters than those scarlet cups which would hereafter bear the name of the chosen one. A slave was ordered to wade into the water to gather an armful of the blossoms. The youth accustomed to homage gravely accepted the wax-like flowers with the limp, snaky stems; the petals closed like eyelids when night fell. In the midst of these pleasures the empress arrived. The long crossing had told on her: she was growing frail without ceasing to be hard. Her political associations no longer caused me annoyance, as in the period when she had foolishly encouraged Suetonius; she now had only inoffensive women writers about her. The confidante of the moment was a certain Julia Balbilla, whose Greek verse was fairly good. The empress and her suite established themselves in the Lyceum, from which they rarely went out. Lucius, on the contrary, was as always avid for all delights, including alike those of the mind and of the eye. At twenty-six he had lost almost nothing of that arresting beauty which aroused acclamations from the youth in the streets of Rome. He was still absurd, ironic, and gay. His caprices of other days had now turned to manias: he made no move without his head cook; his gardeners composed astonishing flower plantings for him even aboard ship; he took his bed with him wherever he went, modeled on his own design of four mattresses stuffed with four special kinds of aromatics, on top of which he lay surrounded by his young mistresses like so many cushions. His pages, painted, powdered, and attired like Zephyrs and Eros, complied as well as they could with mad whims which were sometimes cruel: I had to intervene to keep the young Boreas, whose slenderness Lucius admired, from letting himself die of hunger. All that was more exasperating than charming. We visited together everything to be visited in Alexandria: the Lighthouse, the Mausoleum of Alexander and that of Mark Antony, where Cleopatra triumphs eternally over Octavia, the temples, the workshops and factories, and even the quarter of the embalmers.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I closed the door behind me and we both put our bags on the floor, side by side. The tension was terrific, and I could hear the rapid shushing of my pulse in my ear. I knew everything was up to me. ‘Well …’ I began, but at the same moment he turned away towards the window; his face was stiff with embarrassment and fear. He stood there, looking out. The mood of delay snagged me temporarily. ‘Do you often entertain people here?’ I asked, the words coming out with a quite sarcastic edge. ‘Oh—er, no,’ he replied, half turning his head but still shyly concealing his face. I took the three or four steps it required to cross the room and stand beside and slightly behind him. Outside, beyond where the light from our window fell, there was a deep inner well. The roof in which these rooms were built dropped steeply away, and facing us across the void were other similar dormers, unlit, their windows open into shadowy stillness. Above the roofline the sky was amorously transformed by the pink glare of the London dusk. I put my arm around Phil’s shoulder. He immediately began talking. ‘We can go on the roof,’ he said. ‘During the day the staff sunbathe up there. There’s a really good view.’ Nothing was going to get done unless I took command. Lifting my other hand I gripped his jaw, turned his head towards me and kissed him. Slowly, clumsily, as if being brought back to life, he swivelled round, put his arms around me and then held me extremely tight. I had wanted to kiss him for such a long time that I clung on, forcing my long, pointed tongue to the back of his throat; pulling out and biting his lips till I tasted the blood on my tongue. He was powerless and amazed. When I drew my head back a string of saliva swung between our mouths and I wiped it brutally from his chin. He had gone a deep, searching red. I tugged out the bottom of his T-shirt and slid it up over his rhythmic stomach. The T-shirt was very tight, so I only pushed it into a roll under his armpits and stretched across his hard, jutting tits; I twisted his nipples between my thumb and forefinger and then, holding his eyes with a passionate stare that at once felt almost cruel, I grabbed at his crotch, fumbled and tore open his fly, and pulled down his trousers and underpants to his knees. Through all this he stood, arms away from his sides, impassive, like a child in a doctor’s surgery, or someone being measured for a suit. He made no gesture towards me, except by a curious, serious facial expression: this was what he’d heard about, this was what he wanted us to do.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Afterwards I wandered through Soho & then in Charing Cross Road saw three black GIs loitering along rather idyllically, smoking cigarettes & looking at girls. They had that touching quality which off-duty soldiers so often do have, as if they knew they ought to be up to something but didn’t quite know what it was. There was a fat one, a thin one & an inbetween one with a lost, ingenuous expression which was decidedly heart-stopping. He was clearly the butt of his two smart friends’ humour & had an infinitely tolerant, good-hearted glow about him. I walked beside them to pick up their talk, & then went on & took up an insouciant pose on the other side of Oxford Street, by the Lyon’s Corner House. By some sublime, birthday miracle they split up on the corner opposite, Fat & Thin turning back down Charing Cross Rd as if to have a second, more determined go at something they had funked or got wrong the first time, while my friend crossed over & then crossed again, to the far side of Tottenham Court Road. When I strolled over myself he was looking at the posters at the little cinema there. He appeared uncertain about the prospect of an afternoon of This Happy Breed and something else with Jack Hulbert in. He asked me if I’d seen these films, & I said I had (which I hadn’t) and that they were unutterably tedious. It seemed to me that if he cd be kept out of the cinema then there were possibilities: I wasn’t going to go in with him & sit it out expectantly in the dark for hours on end, smoking American cigarettes. I said why didn’t he come & have a swim at the Corinthian Club, that’s what I was going to do. Like a child who had been hoping for guidance, & with only the faintest hint of adult irony or doubt, he came along, & when he saw the bombed-out far end of the building under all its tarpaulins & scaffolding reacted to it as though it were a cause for personal sympathy and congratulation. I cd hardly wait to get him in the showers, but I hired him some drawers & a towel & drew out our time in the pool as if I were only there for the exercise. Roy (his name, Roy Bartholomew) was a clumsy swimmer, but jolly fast, soldier-fit & divinely constructed. I tested him gently by saying how muscly he was, & he flexed his arms & had me punch him in the stomach—at the same time saying how I shd see so-and-so in his regiment, who evidently has the biggest muscles imaginable. I discovered he likes to box, & wished for a moment I was twenty years younger & cd have taken him on.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I realised why it was, when, after tucking his long-skinned dick into cheap red knickers, and pulling on a grey jersey and those baggy, splotch-bleached jeans which look as though a circle of kids have jacked off all over them, he said to Bill: ‘I got to go and see my girlfriend.’ Bill grinned at him wretchedly. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ he said. 5 The first instalment of Charles’s papers was crammed into an old briefcase. Carrying it on the Underground, I felt like a young schoolmaster, taking home a bag bulging with books and essays. It was heavy, as I lolled in the crowded train, holding it by its charred leather handle, which had been strengthened with black insulating tape and was slightly sticky to the touch. At Tottenham Court Road a young man got on whom I recognised and placed within a second or two as the wiry person that James had fancied a while ago in the showers. He was even more deeply tanned than before, and there was something unsettling about this, as there was about his big, protuberant cock, very emphatic in his light cotton trousers, and the contrast of its fatness with his thin, taut body. He had a sports bag over his shoulder, and the clean gleam of his forehead confirmed that he had come from the Corry and a shower. He stood opposite me in the doorway, and we held each other’s gaze for a long moment before each modestly looked away, though with the evident intention of looking back again after a few seconds. And so the sudden precipitation of sex had begun. At Oxford Circus many people got off, and I dropped into the seat next to the door. Many people also got on, so my view of the boy was blocked. He remained standing where he had been; when I looked across through the glass screen that shelters the seats from the door I saw only the bums and palms of standing passengers flattened witlessly against its other side. I was heightening the drama of the pick-up by making him follow me. This was impossible at Bond Street, where even more people got on. The seat I had taken was marked for the use of the elderly and handicapped, but had another claimant come, a figure like Charles, for instance, I would have been prepared to leave the train, when my stop came, with a lurching gait or limb held awry to designate my previously unguessed incapacity.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I was turning to leave when I spotted a lone Arab boy wandering along, hands in the pockets of his anorak, fairly unremarkable, yet with something about him which made me feel I must have him. I was convinced that he had noticed me, and I felt a delicious surplus of lust and satisfaction at the idea of fucking him while another boy waited for me at home. To test him out I dawdled off behind the pavilion to where some public lavatories, over-frequented by lonely middle-aged men, are tucked into the ivy-covered, pine-darkened bank of the main road. I went down the tiled steps between the tiled walls, and a hygienic, surprisingly sweet smell surrounded me. It was all very clean, and at several of the stalls under the burnished copper pipes (to which someone must attach all their pride), men were standing, raincoats shrouding from the innocent visitor or the suspicious policeman their hour-long footlings. I felt a faint revulsion—not disapproval, but a fear of one day being like that. Their heads seemed grey and loveless to me as they turned in automatic anticipation. What long investment they made for what paltry returns … Did they nod to one another, the old hands, as they took up their positions, day by day, alongside each other in whatever station in their underground cycle of conveniences they had reached? Did anything ever happen, did they, despairing of whatever it was they sought, which could surely never be sex, but at most a glimpse of something memorable, ever make do with each other? I felt certain they didn’t; they were engaged, in a silently agreed silence, in looking out endlessly for something they couldn’t have. I was not shy but too proud and priggish to take up my place among them, and it was with only a moment’s hesitation that I resolved not to do so.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  There was now a fairly complicated set-up on screen, with all six boys doing something interesting, and one of them I realised was Kip Parker, a famous tousle-headed blond teen star. I ran my hand between my new friend’s legs and felt his cock kicking against the tightish cotton of his slacks. He helped me take it out, a short, punchy little number, which I went down on and polished off almost at once. God, he must have been ready. After a shocked recuperation he felt for his bag and went out without a word. I’d had a growing suspicion throughout this sordid but charming little episode, which rose to a near certainty as he opened the door and was caught in a slightly brighter light, that the boy was Phil from the Corry. He had smelt of sweat rather than talcum powder and there was a light stubble on his jaw, so I concluded that if it were Phil he was on his way to rather than from the Club, as I knew he was fastidiously clean, and that he always shaved in the evening before having his shower. I was tempted to follow him at once, to make sure, but I realised it would be easy enough to tell from seeing him later; and besides, a very well-hung kid, who’d already been showing an interest in our activities, moved in to occupy the boy’s former seat, and brought me off epically during the next film, an unthinkably tawdry picture which all took place in a kitchen. On the train home I carried on reading Valmouth. It was an old grey and white Penguin Classic that James had lent me, the pages stiff and foxed, with a faint smell of lost time. Wet-bottomed wine glasses had left mauve rings over the sketch of the author by Augustus John and the price, 3/6, which appeared in a red square on the cover. Nonetheless, I was enjoined to take especial care of the book, which also contained Prancing Nigger and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. James had a mania for Firbank, and it was only out of his love for me that he had let me take away this apparently undistinguished old paperback, which bore on its flyleaf the absurd signature ‘O. de V. Green’. James held the average Firbank-lover in contempt, and professed a very serious attitude towards his favourite writer. I had long deferred reading him in the childishly stubborn way that one resists all keen and repeated recommendations, and had imagined him until now to be a supremely frivolous and silly author.

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

  This first encounter between Nonnos and Pelagia is layered with meaning. As has been noticed, it mimics the scenes of love at first sight between the heroes and heroines of romance. Carnal eros has been displaced by spiritual yearning. Nonnos’s anguish and weeping are drawn directly from the stock of romantic tropes. By the time the Life was written, stylized encounters between holy men and prostitutes had become a regular part of the fictional repertoire. The true holy man—monks like John the Dwarf or Serapion, even rabbis like Hanina and Meir—could stand face-to-face with the prostitute, unfazed by her charm. These scenes assume, and defy, the serious physics of the gaze that are essential to romance. In Leucippe and Clitophon, beauty comes in at the eye; its ray of particulates enters and enervates the soul. An even richer comparandum is the scene in Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Tale in which the priest Kalasiris fled his native town because a courtesan of unparalleled beauty appeared in his city; there was no escape from the “dragnet of erotic charm” that emanated from her eyes. So Kalasiris fled to Greece! Kalasiris, a richly characterized holy man who plays a central role in the narrative, is closer to late antique fiction than to erotic romance, but because The Ethiopian Tale is still a romance, it obeys the erotics of the gaze. Simple indifference or moral superiority to the power of beauty would offend the conventions of the genre, so to preserve his purity Kalasiris must emigrate. The Christian ascetic, by contrast, has attained a spiritual power that transcends the physics of beauty, and the scenes of encounter between holy men and whores dramatize their impassibility.61

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Before going to the Corry I cut down through Soho Square to a cinema in Frith Street. It wasn’t so much to see a film as to sit in a dark, anonymous place and do dark, anonymous things. Arthur and I had got wrecked on tequila the night before, the bottled romance of Mexico, as it described itself. The evenings had been getting longer lately, in two senses, and we both needed a little help with our own bottled romance. As it was he had become brash and giggly and fallen into an open-mouthed, stertorous sleep during the first five minutes of the Royal Command Performance. Deeply drunk myself, I roamed off to bed, and the next morning, when I woke groaning and groping at nine, dimly remembered looking at myself with immense self-satisfaction in the hall mirror and giving a barely prophetic rendition of ‘Nessun dorma’ seven or eight times. As always when I had a bad hangover I felt criminally randy, but Arthur, whom I found still lying on the sitting-room floor, his chin sticky with a dozer’s saliva, spent the morning alternately shitting and vomiting (which was painful for him) and walking very slowly from one item of furniture to another, his lower lip drooping and with a funny look about him which I realised was his equivalent of pallor. Though it was not much fun, this hangover created a minor drama in our life and we reacted to it with disbelieving shakings of the head, exaggerated winces and a vocabulary honed down to ‘man’, ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ produced in gasps or cracked whispers. Then Arthur, with a comical ungainliness, as if he were running a three-legged race with an invisible partner, would canter off to the lavatory once more. Later I got him to go to bed and went out, still quite speedy from the drink and in the mood for what sex-club owners call an experience.

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  See Sappho, Frag. 2. (Wharton): “ ... For when I see thee but a little, I have no utterance left, my tongue is broken down, and straightway a subtle fire has run under my skin. With my eyes I have no sight, my ears ring, sweat pours down, and a trembling seizes all my body; I am paler than grass, and seem in my madness little better than one dead....” * * * * * LXXV “The object.” See the sixth mime of Herondas (too long to reproduce here) translated in Symonds’ “Studies of the Greek Poets” (Third edition. 1893. II-237). This mime describes a visit between two women in reference to the same sort of object sought by Bilitis’ friend. One of Herondas’ ladies remarks, about her leather worker, “He works at his own house and sells on the sly ... but the things he makes, they’re like Athene’s handiwork ... a cobbler more kindly disposed toward the female sex you would not find....” The price was “fourpence.” * * * * * LXXXI “Thy hair is moist.” See Meleager (Anth. Pal. V-175): “Truly, thou betrayest thyself; thy locks, still moist with perfumes, denounce thy dissolute life; thine eyes, heavy with fatigue, show well how thy night has been passed; this coronal upon thy forehead reveals the festival; this disordered hair shows the path of amorous hands; and all thy body staggers under the vapors of the wine....” * * * * * LXXXIII “For whom, now, shall I paint my lips?” See Paulus Silentiarius (Anth. Pal. V-228): “For whom shall I curl my hair? for whom trim my nails? for whom perfume my hands? To what end this purple-banded cloak, since I go not to beautiful Rhodopis?...” EPIGRAMS IN THE ISLAND OF CYPROS XCIV “Thyrses.” These were long rods, often surmounted by a pine cone, carried by votaries of Dionysos. Too long to be used as drum-sticks. * * * * * CI “Conversation.” See Philodemos (Anth. Pal. V-46): “I salute thee.--I salute thee also.--What is thy name?--And thine? Thou mayest know mine later.--Thou art in a hurry?--And thou art not?--Hast thou someone?--I have always my lover.--Wilt thou eat dinner with me to-day?--If thou wishest.--Good. What shall I give thee?--Give me nothing in advance.--That is strange.--But when the night is over, give what thou wishest.--Thou art a just girl. Where is thy dwelling? I will send for thee.--I will show thee.--And when wilt thou come?--At once, if thou wishest--At once, then.--Lead the way.” * * * * * CIII “A girdle of silver plates.” See Asclepiades (Anth. Pal. V-158): “Upon a day, I played with facile Hermione. Like the Goddess, she wore a girdle broidered with flowers; and on it I read, in letters of gold: Love me, but grieve not if I give myself to another.” * * * * * CIX “Athena.” Artemis was more likely to be seen bathing, with disastrous results to the spectator, as noted in the legend of Actæon.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  This perfume would be as distinctive as her clothes yet more ethereal, literally something in the air that would excite men and women and infect them with the desire to possess it. To accomplish this she would go in the opposite direction from all the other perfumes out there, which were associated with some natural, floral scent. Instead, she wanted to create something that was not identifiable as a particular flower. She wanted it to smell like “a bouquet of abstract flowers,” something pleasant but completely novel. More than any other perfume, it would smell different on each woman. To take this further, she decided to give it a most unusual name. Perfumes of the time had very poetic, romantic titles. Instead, she would name it after herself, attaching a simple number, Chanel No. 5, as if it were a scientific concoction. She packaged the perfume in a sleek modernist bottle and added to the label her new logo of interlocking C ’s. It looked like nothing else out there. To launch the perfume, she decided upon a subliminal campaign. She began by spraying the scent everywhere in her store in Paris. It filled the air. Women kept asking what it was and she would feign ignorance. She would then slip bottles of the perfume, without labels, into the bags of her wealthiest and best-connected clients. Soon women began to talk of this strange new scent, rather haunting and impossible to identify as any known flower. The word of yet another Chanel creation began to spread like wildfire and women were soon showing up at her store begging to buy the new scent, which she now began to place discreetly on shelves. In the first few weeks they could not stock enough. Nothing like this had ever happened in the industry, and it would go on to become the most successful perfume in history, making her a fortune. Over the next two decades the house of Chanel reigned supreme in the fashion world, but during World War II she flirted with Nazism, staying in Paris during the Nazi occupation and visibly siding with the occupiers. She had closed her store at the beginning of the war, and by the end of the war she had been thoroughly disgraced in the eyes of the French by her political sympathies. Aware and perhaps ashamed, she fled to Switzerland, where she would remain in self- imposed exile. By 1953, however, she felt the need not only for a comeback but for something even greater. Although she was now seventy, she had become disgusted at the latest trends in fashion, which she felt had returned to the old constrictions and fussiness of women’s clothing that she had sought to destroy. Perhaps this also signaled a return to a more subservient role for women. To Chanel it would be the ultimate challenge—after some fourteen years out of business, she was now largely forgotten. No one thought of her anymore as a trendsetter.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  banal circumstances. They want fantasy and objects of desire to covet and grope after. Create an air of mystery around you and your work. Associate it with something new, unfamiliar, exotic, progressive, and taboo. Do not define your message but leave it vague. Create an illusion of ubiquity—your object is seen everywhere and desired by others. Then let the covetousness so latent in all humans do the rest, setting off a chain reaction of desire. At last I have what I wanted. Am I happy? Not real y. But what’s missing? My soul no longer has that piquant activity conferred by desire. . . . Oh, we shouldn’t delude ourselves—pleasure isn’t in the fulfil ment, but in the pursuit. —Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais Keys to Human Nature By nature, we humans are not easily contented with our circumstances. By some perverse force within us, the moment we possess something or get what we want, our minds begin to drift toward something new and different, to imagine we can have better. The more distant and unattainable this new object, the greater is our desire to have it. We can call this the grass-is-always-greener syndrome , the psychological equivalent of an optical illusion—if we get too close to the grass, to that new object, we see that is not really so green after all. This syndrome has very deep roots in our nature. The earliest recorded example can be found in the Old Testament, in the story of the exodus from Egypt. Chosen by God to bring the Hebrews to the Promised Land, Moses led them into the wilderness, where they would wander for forty years. In Egypt the Hebrews had served as slaves and their lives had been difficult. Once they suffered hardships in the desert, however, they suddenly grew nostalgic for their previous life. Facing starvation, God provided them with manna from heaven, but they could only compare it unfavorably to the delicious melons and cucumbers and meats they had known in Egypt. Not sufficiently excited by God’s other miracles (the parting of the Red Sea, for example), they decided to forge and worship a golden calf, but once Moses punished them for this, they quickly dropped their interest in this new idol. All along the way they griped and complained, giving Moses endless headaches. The men lusted after foreign women; the people kept looking for some new cult to follow. God himself was so irritated by their endless discontent that he barred this entire generation, including Moses, from ever entering the Promised Land. But even after the next generation established itself in the land of milk and honey, the grumbling continued unabated. Whatever they had, they dreamed of something better over the horizon. Closer to home, we can see this syndrome at work in our daily lives. We continually look at other people who seem to have it better than us—their parents were more loving, their careers more exciting,

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He looked up into my eyes. ‘Anyway you come back after a bit.’ ‘How’s your face feeling?’ I asked. ‘James says he’ll come tomorrow and take the stitches out—just the ends, apparently, and the rest all dissolves.’ ‘Not too bad.’ I ran my hands over his soft half-open mauve lips. His tongue slid up and licked my fingers. I had certainly never fallen in love more inconveniently, and more and more I wanted it to end. Even when he spoke, in his basic, unimaginative way, I felt almost sick with desire and compassion for him. Indeed, the fact that he had not mastered speech, that he laboured towards saying the simplest things, that his vocal expressions were prompted only by the strength of his feelings, unlike the camp, exploitative, ironical control of my own speech, made me want him more. Loving him was all interpretation, creative in its way. We barely used language at all to communicate: he sulked and thought I was putting him down if I made complicated remarks, and sometimes I felt numb at the compromise and self-suppression I submitted to. Yet beyond that it was all guesswork; we were thinking for two. The darkened air of the flat was full of the hints we made. The stupidity and the resentment were dreadful at times. But then in sex he lost his awkwardness. He showed his capacity to change as I rambled over him now with my fingertips and watched him glow and gulp with desire; his clothes seemed to shrivel off him and he lay there making his naked claim for the only certainty in his life. It wasn’t something learnt, I suspected, from the guys before me who’d picked him up and fucked him and fucked him around. It was a kind of gift for giving, and while he did whatever I wanted it emerged as the most important thing there was for him. It was all the harder, then, when the resentment returned and I longed for him to go. After James had taken out Arthur’s stitches we took the Tube to the Corry together, leaving Arthur to do—whatever he did when I wasn’t there. ‘He watches telly most of the time, I think,’ I said. ‘Does he read or anything?’ James wanted to know. ‘He once asked me to buy him some War Picture Library comics, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it in our local newsagents.’ ‘I can see it would sort ill with Apollo, Tatler and GQ —but I expect newsagents get used to the strangest combinations of taste. They have to look on patiently while kids thumb through Men Only and Penthouse and end up buying the Beano and the Bucks Fizz fan mag.

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  “Good morning.--Good morning also.--Thou art in a great hurry.--Perhaps less than thou thinkest.--Thou art a pretty girl.--Perhaps more so than thou believest. “What is thy charming name?--I tell it not so quickly.--Thou hast someone this evening?--Always there is my lover.--And how dost thou love him?--As he wishes. “Let us sup together.--If thou desirest. But what givest thou?--This.--Five drachmæ? It is for my slave. And for me?--Say it thyself.--An hundred. “Where livest thou?--In this blue house.--At what hour may I send to seek thee?--At once, if thou wishest.--At once.--Go before.” CII THE TORN ROBE “Holla! by the two goddesses, who is the insolent one who has put his foot upon my robe?--It is a lover.--It is a blockhead.--I have been awkward, pardon me. “Imbecile! my yellow robe is all torn in the back, and if I walk thus in the street, they will take me for a poor girl who serves Cypris inversely. “Wilt thou not stop?--I believe that he speaks to me again!--Why dost thou leave me, thus angered?... Thou respondest not? Alas! I dare speak no more. “I certainly must return to my house to change my robe.--And may I not follow thee? Who is thy father?--He is the rich captain Nikias.--Thou hast fair eyes, I pardon thee.” CIII THE JEWELS A diadem of fretted gold crowns my straight, white forehead. Five chains of gold that follow the curve of my cheeks and chin, are suspended from my hair by two large clasps. Upon my arms, which Iris would envy, thirteen silver bracelets twine. How heavy they are! But they are weapons; and I know one enemy who has suffered from them. I am truly all covered with gold. My breasts are cuirassed with two pectorals of gold. The images of the gods have not more riches than I have. And I wear upon my heavy robe, a girdle of silver plates. There thou canst read this verse: “Love me eternally; but be not afflicted if I deceive thee three times each day.” CIV THE INDIFFERENT ONE Since he has entered my chamber, whoever he may be (that is his concern): “See,” I say to my slave, “what a handsome man! and should not a courtesan be happy?” I declare he is Adonis, Ares or Herakles, according to his countenance, or the Old Man of the Sea if his hair is pale silver. And then, what disdain for trifling youth! “Ah!” I say, “if I had not to pay my florist and my goldsmith tomorrow, how I would love to say to thee: I do not wish thy gold! I am thy passionate servant!” Then, when he has closed his arms under my shoulders, I see a boatman of the port pass like a divine image over the starry sky of my transparent lids. CV PURE WATER OF THE BASIN “Pure water of the basin, immobile mirror, tell me of my beauty.--Bilitis, or whoever thou art, Tethys perhaps, or Amphitrite, thou art beautiful, thou knowest.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I shall never believe in the classification of love among the purely physical joys (supposing that any such things exist) until I see a gourmet sobbing with delight over his favorite dish like a lover gasping on a young shoulder. Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the body's ecstasy. To put reason aside is not indispensable for a drinker, but the lover who leaves reason in control does not follow his god to the end. In every act save that of love, abstinence and excess alike involve but one person; any step in the direction of sensuality, however, places us in the presence of the Other, and involves us in the demands and servitudes to which our choice binds us (except in the case of Diogenes, where both the limitations and the merits of reasonable expedient are self-evident). I know no decision which a man makes for simpler or more inevitable reasons, where the object chosen is weighed more exactly for its balance of sheer pleasure, or where the seeker after truth has a better chance to judge the naked human being. Each time, from a stripping down as absolute as that of death, and from a humility which surpasses that of defeat and of prayer, I marvel to see again reforming the complex web of experiences shared and refused, of mutual responsibilities, awkward avowals, transparent lies, and passionate compromises between my pleasures and those of the Other, so many bonds impossible to break but nevertheless so quickly loosened. That mysterious play which extends from love of a body to love of an entire person has seemed to me noble enough to consecrate to it one part of my life. Words for it are deceiving, since the word for pleasure covers contradictory realities comprising notions of warmth, sweetness, and intimacy of bodies, but also feelings of violence and agony, and the sound of a cry.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Meana was not the first or only expert to tell me that while straight men are likely to report that they are sexually satisfied if they get sex regularly from their long-term partners, women are another story. “Marriage itself tends to routinize what was once transgressive and sexy in ways that especially impact us,” she explained, “overfamiliarizing” our spouses in a fashion that we struggle with. In a talk she gave, Meana had also mentioned that “crude initiations” (a husband or partner who doesn’t bother trying to be seductive) and being exhausted from mothering and “wife-ing”—being in charge of the domesticated this and that of coupled life—also tended to push female desire underground. When I asked Meana whether any of her study participants had talked to her about seeking sex outside their marriages, she shook her head no, explaining that they wanted to get sexual satisfaction and excitement with their life partners. “But so many women experiencing low desire in long-term partnerships know that if they did step out, their desire would probably be back like that,” she said, snapping her fingers. Meana has of late been homing in on “female erotic self-focus,” which sounds like masturbation but isn’t. Acting on a hunch that women were deriving arousal from their very own sexiness as much as or more than their male partners’, she asked a group of men and women, “Would you want to sleep with you?” Hell yes, many women basically said, in a way that suggested to Meana that in some sense they already had. Men, on the other hand, mostly didn’t even know what she was talking about. “There’s this way in which seeing themselves desired is the ultimate turn-on for women,” Meana told me, “which suggests that female sexuality has a kind of wonderful autonomy that people miss all the time.” She said she had titled the paper she and her graduate student wrote on the topic “It’s Not You, It’s Me,” and we laughed at the play on a familiar apology reframed as an unapologetic declaration about what women want and need during sex: to see themselves as sexy and desired. Meana likes to refer to pop culture to bring her points home, and now she mentioned song lyrics like “You make me feel like a natural woman,” and Shania Twain pronouncing, “Man! I feel like a woman!” and Katy Perry singing, “Put your hands on me in my skintight jeans.” “What’s going on with these lyrics? You’re a woman so of course you feel like a woman, right?” Meana noted gamely. “But what it’s telling us is that the singers are a lot more focused in these songs on themselves. See?”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  We’d had nothing like it at Mr. Tootel’s. I recall how Strong, whose figure was pretty well though not excessively attuned to his name, stood up dripping & came and stood beside me. I was not used to taking my clothes off in public: I hung back with my hands clasped in front of me rather than climb into the scummy water out of which this prefect had just arisen. There was something repugnant to me in the water: it was one of the many moments when the sweet, civilised certainties of home were trampled by the stronger, medieval laws of school. ‘Get in, baby,’ said Strong with a sceptical look, drying himself brusquely. Still I hesitated, and I think I was only able to do it because I felt suddenly unaware of myself in the senior boy’s presence. Certainly it never struck me that I could be seen in a sexual light myself. I looked at Strong, and at his red, thick prick, which was thickly overgrown with black hair, as were his legs, all matted & streaked down with the bathwater. I had never been in the proximity of a mature boy before. I suppose I must have stared rather obviously—not out of lust but interest. I think, though I cannot be sure, that Strong took this as a kind of sign, and perhaps he was aware of the spell he had cast. I was not aware of it myself, only now I see that it was the first time that something happened that wd recur with me—a kind of loss of selfconsciousness in the aura of a more beautiful or desired person. My eyes were entranced, & devoured what was before them. In retrospect I think I see the selfconscious way Strong finally wrapped his towel round his waist and called out boisterously to another prefect, ‘Bloody new men!’ I felt a thrill of mastered shock at his language. After that I always got straight in the water: that too was because I had passed through some kind of initiation. I knew that one day I should leave the water for other men younger than myself. I remember how the little islets of scum used to float between one’s legs & hang around one’s kit. I was made to learn my notions, never imagining that they were useless to anyone older than the prefects who tested us on them. I memorised them religiously, & will never forget them, I suppose.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  And I remembered reading somewhere that a Californian talentspotter had photographic records of three thousand or more of them ranging back over twenty or thirty years and that a youngster, after a session in the studio, mooching through the files, had found pictures of his own father, posed long before. In the meantime there were other arrivals at the cinema, though it was difficult to make them out; while the sunlit introduction had brightened up the room and cast its aura over the scattered audience in the forward rows, the sex scenes within the barn were enacted in comparative gloom, allowing the viewers a secretive darkness. I tugged my half-hard cock out through my fly and stroked it casually. One new entrant tottered to the deserted front row, which in this tiny space was only a few feet from the screen. There was a rustle of papers, and I could see him in silhouette remove his coat, fold it neatly and place it on the seat next to that in which he then sat down. The rustling recurred intermittently, and I guessed he must be a man I’d seen at the Brutus the very first time I went there, a spry little chap of sixty-five or so who, like a schoolgirl taken to a romantic U picture, sat entranced by the movies and worked his way through a bag of boiled sweets as the action unfolded. A fiver from his pension, perhaps, and 30p for the humbugs, might be set aside weekly for this little outing. How he must look forward to it! His was a complete and innocent absorption in the fantasy world on screen. Could he look back to a time when he had behaved like these glowing, thoughtless teenagers, who were now locked together sucking on each other’s cocks in the hay? Or was this the image of a new society we had made, where every desire could find its gratification? The old man was happy with his cough-drops, but I wanted some other oral pleasure (the Winchester slang ‘suction’, meaning sweets, I realised was the comprehensive term). Not, however, from the person who came scouting up to the rear rows now, one of the plump, bespectacled Chinese youths who, with day-return businessmen and quite distinguished Oxbridge dons, made a haunt of places like this, hopping hopefully from row to row, so persistent that they were inevitably, from time to time, successful. The man on the end of the row had to shift, and I realised I was to be the next recipient of Eastern approaches. The boy sat down next to me, and though I carried on looking at the screen and laid my hand across my cock, I was aware that he was staring at me intently to try and make out my face in the darkness, and I felt his breath on my cheek. Then there was the pressure of his shoulder against mine.

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  How then can we love a man who is rough with us? He seizes us as girls and leaves us before the delight. Thou, thou art a woman, thou knowest what I mean. Thou canst take it as for thyself. CXX THE COMMAND “Old woman, hear me. I give a festival in three days. It is to divert me. Thou wilt lend me all thy girls. How many hast thou, and what can they do?” “I have seven. Three dance the Kordax with the scarf and the phallos. Nephele of the sleek armpits will mimic the love of doves between her rosy breasts. “One singer in a broidered peplos will chant the songs of Rhodes, accompanied by two auletrides who will have garlands of myrtle rolled about their brown legs.” “It is well. See that they be freshly depilated, laved and perfumed from head to foot, ready for other games if they are demanded. Go give the orders. Farewell.” CXXI THE FIGURE OF PASIPHAE In a debauch that two young men and some courtesans made at my house, where love gushed out like wine, Damalis, in honor of her name, danced the Figure of Pasiphae. She had caused to be made at Kition two masks of a cow and of a bull, for herself and for Karmantidea. She wore terrible horns, and a hairy tail upon her croup. The other women, led by me, held the flowers and the torches, and we turned about ourselves with cries and we caressed Damalis with the tips of our pendent tresses. Their lowings and our songs and the dancing of our loins lasted longer than the night. The empty chamber is still warm. I regard my reddened knees and the canthares of Kôs where the roses float. CXXII THE JUGGLER When the first dawn blended with the feeble glimmer of the torches, I sent into the orgie a flute-player, vicious and agile, who trembled a little, being cold. Praise the little girl of the blue lids, of the short hair, of the sharp breasts, clad only in a girdle from which hung yellow ribbons and the stems of black iris. Praise her! for she was adroit and performed difficult tricks. She juggled with hoops, without breaking anything in the room, she glided through them like a grasshopper. Sometimes she made a wheel, bending upon her hands and feet. Or, with her two legs in the air and her knees apart, she curved herself backward and touched the ground, laughing. CXXIII THE DANCE OF THE FLOWERS Anthis, dancing-girl of Lydia, has seven veils about her. She unrolls the yellow veil, her black hair spreads out. The rosy veil slips from her mouth. The white veil falls, revealing her naked arms. She releases her little breasts from the red veil that unties itself. She lets fall the green veil from her double, rounded croup. She draws the blue veil from her shoulders, but she presses upon her puberty the last transparent veil.

• From Untrue (2018)

  What does it all mean? That women are, on some level, super freaks. Our libidos don’t give a hoot about the boxes we check. We are sexual anarchists, in the formulation of Daniel Bergner, the author of What Do Women Want?, who spent time observing Chivers at work, and whose assertions about women’s unexpected appetites basically suggest we might quite fairly be described as the “largest group of sexual deviants” in the world. As we sat and talked over drinks, Chivers explained her recent work, which suggests female desires don’t just confound categories; they’re also stronger than we’ve been told. In a 2014 study, Chivers told me as she sipped her Negroni, she had participants watch sexy films and then report their responses and desire to have sex with a partner and masturbate. Remarkably, men and women reported essentially identical degrees of desire. “There is this fairly monolithic idea about a gender difference in sexual desire…it’s like a sacred cow [in sex research].” She paused and then went on, her tone measured, to describe how the findings had created controversy in her field and at the conference itself. “It’s frustrating to hear it repeated over and over that men have stronger [libidos] than women do, as if that’s a simple fact. Let’s consider that maybe we’ve been measuring desire incorrectly.” She pointed out that there were a few other papers with preliminary findings like her own and told me she expected there might be more if researchers measured triggered or responsive desire rather than spontaneous desire. Chivers has a composed, elegant, and almost patrician bearing, making her at once an unlikely and ideal bomb thrower. Like Kaupp, she seemed philosophical about upending the order of things in sex research, where the notion still prevails, as it does in nearly every corner of our society, that men want sex more than women do, and that testosterone and androgens are the main drivers of sexual desire. “That people like to hang their hats on certain presumed truths doesn’t mean they’re true,” she noted. For her, the science is the thing. A third experiment in Chivers’s lab suggested yet another surprise: that straight women were not as turned on by the idea of sex with a male friend as they were by the idea of sex with a long-term partner or a total stranger. In fact, she explained as the bar got louder and people crowded around us, female study participants were just as turned on by the idea of sex with a stranger as straight men were. When it comes to fantasies about partners, they enjoy novelty every bit as much as the guys. Not to mention having those restless, category-confounding desires we might think of as more of a “guy thing.”