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 My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Oh” she cried, “as you draw out, my heart follows your sex in fear of losing it and as you push in again, it opens wide in ecstasy and wants you all, all—” and she kissed me with hot lips. “Here is something new,” she exclaimed, “food for your vanity from my love! Mad as you make me with your love-thrusts, for at one moment I am hot and dry with desire, the next wet with passion, bathed in love, I could live with you all my life without having you, if you wished it, or if it would do you good. Do you believe me?” “Yes,” I replied, continuing the love-game; but occasionally withdrawing to rub her clitoris with my sex and then slowly burying him in her cunt again to the hilt. “We women have no souls but love,” she said faintly, her eyes dying as she spoke: “I torture myself to think of some new pleasure for you, and yet you’ll leave me, I feel you will, for some silly girl who can’t feel a tithe of what I feel or give you what I give—.” She began here to breathe quickly: “I’ve been thinking how to give you more pleasure; let me try. Your seed, darling, is dear to me: I don’t want it in my sex; I want to feel you thrill and so I want your sex in my mouth, I want to drink your essence and I will—” and suiting the action to the word she slipped down in the bed and took my sex in her mouth and began rubbing it up and down till my seed spirted in long jets, filling her mouth while she swallowed it greedily. “Now do I love you, Sir!” she exclaimed, drawing herself up on me again and nestling against me: “wait till some girl does that to you and you’ll know she loves you to distraction or better still to self-destruction.” “Why do you talk of any other girl!” I chided her, “I don’t imagine you going with any other man, why should you torment yourself just as causelessly?”

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  In two or three minutes she had again let down a flow of love-juice or so I believed and I kept right on with the love-game, knowing that the first experience is never forgotten by a girl and resolved to keep on to dinner-time if necessary to make her first love-joust ever memorable to her. Kate lasted longer than Mrs. Mayhew: I came ever so many times, passing ever more slowly from orgasm to orgasm before she began to move to me; but at length her breath began to get shorter and shorter and she held me to her violently, moving her pussy the while up and down harshly against my manroot. Suddenly she relaxed and fell back: there was no hysteria; but plainly I could feel the mouth of her womb fasten on my cock as if to suck it. That excited me fiercely and for the first time I indulged in quick, hard thrusts till a spasm of intensest pleasure shook me and my seed spirted or seemed to spirt for the sixth or seventh time. When I had finished kissing and praising my lovely partner and drew away, I was horrified: the bed was a sheet of blood and some had gone on my pants: Kate’s thighs and legs even were all incarnadined, making the lovely ivory white of her skin, one red. You may imagine how softly I used the towel on her legs and sex before I showed her the results of our love-passage. To my astonishment she was unaffected: “You must take the sheet away and burn it”, she said, “or drop it in the river: I guess it won’t be the first.” “Did it hurt very much”, I asked. “At first a good deal”, she replied, “but soon the pleasure overpowered the smart and I would not even forget the pain: I love you so: I am not even afraid of consequences with you: I trust you absolutely and love to trust you and run whatever risks you wish.”

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Since then I have read lascivious books in half a dozen languages and they all represent women coming to an orgasm in the act, as men do, followed by a period of content: which only shows that the books are all written by men and ignorant, insensitive men at that. The truth is hardly one married woman in a thousand is ever brought to her highest pitch of feeling: usually, just when she begins to feel, her husband goes to sleep. If the majority of husbands satisfied their wives occasionally, the Woman’s Revolt would soon move to another purpose: women want above all a lover who loves to excite them to the top of their bent. As a rule men through economic conditions marry so late that they have already half exhausted their virile power before they marry. And when they marry young they are so ignorant and so self-centered that they imagine their wives must be satisfied when they are. Mrs. Mayhew told me that her husband had never excited her really. She denied that she had ever had any acute pleasure from his embraces. “Shall I make you hysterical again?” I asked, out of boyish vanity, “I can, you know!” “You mustn’t tire yourself!” she warned, “my husband taught me long ago that when a woman tires a man, he gets a distaste for her and I want your love, your desire, dear, a thousand times more even that the delight you give me—” “Don’t be afraid”, I broke in, “you are sweet, you couldn’t tire me: turn sideways and put your left leg up, and I’ll just let my sex caress your clitoris back and forth gently; every now and then I’ll let it go right in until our hairs meet.” I kept on this game perhaps half an hour until she first sighed and sighed and then made awkward movements with her pussy which I sought to divine and meet as she wished when suddenly she cried: “Oh! Oh! hurt me, please! hurt me, or I’ll bite you! Oh God, oh, oh”—panting, breathless till again the tears poured down! “You darling!” she sobbed, “how you can love! Could you go on forever?” For answer I put her hand on my sex: “Just as naughty as ever”, she exclaimed, “and I am choking, breathless, exhausted! Oh, I’m sorry”, she went on, “but we should get up, for I don’t want my help to know or guess: niggers talk—” I got up and went to the windows; one gave on the porch but the other directly on the garden. “What are you looking at?” she asked coming to me. “I was just looking for the best way to get out if ever we were surprised”, I said, “if we leave this window open I can always drop into the garden and get away quickly.” “You would hurt yourself”, she cried.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  For some moments she didn’t speak, then: “I feel as if I had passed through fever”, she said, putting her hands through her hair, lifting it in a gesture I was to know well in the days to come: “Never promise again if you don’t come: I thought I should go mad: waiting is a horrible torture! Who kept you?—some girl?” and her eyes searched mine. I excused myself; but her intensity chilled me. At the risk of alienating my girl-readers, I must confess this was the effect her passion had on me. When I kissed her, her lips were cold. But by the time we had got upstairs, she had thawed: she shut the door after us gravely and began: “See how ready I am for you!” and in a moment she had thrown back her robe and stood before me naked: she tossed the garment on a chair; it fell on the floor: she stooped to pick it up with her bottom to me: I kissed her soft bottom and caught her up by it with my hand on her sex. She turned her head over her shoulder: “I’ve washed and scented myself for you, Sir: how do you like the perfume? and how do you like this bush of hair?” and she touched her Mount with a grimace; “I was so ashamed of it as a girl: I used to shave it off: that’s what made it grow so thick, I believe: one day my mother saw it and made me stop shaving; oh, how ashamed of it I was: it’s animal, ugly:—don’t you hate it? Oh! tell the truth!” she cried, “or rather, don’t; tell me you love it.” “I love it,” I exclaimed, “because it’s yours!” “Oh you dear lover,” she smiled, “you always find the right word, the flattering salve for the sore!” “Are you ready for me?” I asked, “ripe-ready or shall I kiss you first and caress pussy?” “Whatever you do, will be right,” she said, “you know I am rotten-ripe, soft and wet for you always!” All this while I was taking off my clothes: now I too was naked. “I want you to draw up your knees,” I said: “I want to see the Holy of Holies, the shrine of my idolatry.” At once she did as I asked. Her legs and bottom were well-shaped without being statuesque; but her clitoris was much more than the average button: it stuck out fully half an inch and the inner lips of her vulva hung down a little below the outer lips. I knew I should see prettier pussies. Kate’s was better shaped, I felt sure, and the heavy, madder-brown lips put me off a little.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  But in another moment she took the lead: “Some one might find us here,” she whispered, “I’ve let the maid go: come up to my bedroom” and she took me upstairs. I begged her to undress: I wanted to see her figure; but she only said, “I have no corsets on, I don’t often wear them in the house. Are you sure you love me, dear?” “You know I do!” was my answer. The next moment I lifted her on to the bed, drew up her clothes, opened her legs and was in her. There was no difficulty and in a moment or two I came; but went right on poking passionately; in a few minutes her breath went and came quickly and her eyes fluttered and she met my thrusts with sighs and nippings of her sex. My second orgasm took some time and all the while Lorna became more and more responsive, till suddenly she put her hands on my bottom and drew me to her forcibly while she moved her sex up and down awkwardly to meet my thrusts with a passion I had hardly imagined. Again and again I came and the longer the play lasted, the wilder was her excitement and delight. She kissed me hotly foraging and thrusting her tongue into my mouth. Finally she pulled up her chemise to get me further into her and at length with little sobs she suddenly got hysterical and panting wildly, burst into a storm of tears. That stopped me: I withdrew my sex and took her in my arms and kissed her; at first she clung to me with choking sighs and streaming eyes, but as soon as she had won a little control, I went to the toilette and brought her a sponge of cold water and bathed her face and gave her some water to drink—that quieted her. But she would not let me leave her even to arrange my clothes. “Oh, you great, strong dear,” she cried, with her arms clasping me, “oh, who would have believed such intense pleasure possible: I never felt anything like it before: how could you keep on so long! Oh, how I love you, you wonder and delight! “I am all yours,” she added gravely, “you shall do what you like with me: I am your mistress, your slave, your plaything and you are my God and my love! Oh, Darling! oh!” There was a pause while I smiled at her extravagant praise, then suddenly she sat up and got out of bed: “You wanted to see my figure”, she exclaimed, “here it is, I can deny you nothing; I only hope it may please you” and in a moment or two she showed herself nude from head to stocking.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  But even that meeting with Smith, wherein I reached the topmost height of golden hours, was set off, so to speak, by another happening of this wonder-week. At the next table to me in the dining-room I had already remarked once or twice a little, middle-aged, weary looking man who often began his breakfast with a glass of boiling water and followed it up with a baked apple drowned in rich cream. Brains, too, or sweetbreads he would eat for dinner and rice, not potatoes: when I looked surprise, he told me he had been up all night and had a weak digestion, Mayhew, he said, was his name and explained that if I ever wanted a game of faro or euchre or indeed anything else, he’d oblige me. I smiled; I could ride and shoot, I replied; but I was no good at cards. The day after my talk with Smith, Mayhew and I were both late for supper: I sat long over a good meal and as he rose, he asked me if I would come across the street and see his “lay-out!” I went willingly enough, having nothing to do. The gambling saloon was on the first floor of a building nearly opposite the Eldridge House: the place was well-kept and neat, thanks to a colored bar-tender and colored waiter and a nigger of all work. The long room too was comfortably furnished and very brightly lit—altogether an attractive place. As luck would have it, while he was showing me round, a lady came in; Mayhew after a word or two introduced me to her as his wife: Mrs. Mayhew was then a woman of perhaps twenty-eight or thirty, with tall, lissom slight figure and interesting rather than pretty face: her features were all good, her eyes even were large and blue-gray: she would have been lovely if her coloring had been more pronounced: give her golden hair or red or black and she would have been a beauty: she was always tastefully dressed and had appealing, ingratiating manners. I soon found that she loved books and reading and as Mayhew said he was going to be busy, I asked if I might see her home. She consented smiling and away we went. She lived in a pretty frame house standing alone in a street that ran parallel to Massachusetts Street, nearly opposite to a large and ugly church. As she went up the steps to the door, I noticed that she had fine, neat ankles and I divined shapely limbs. While she was taking off her light cloak and hat, the lifting of her arms stretched her bodice and showed small round breasts: already my blood was lava and my mouth parched with desire.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Don’t we try all sorts of tricks? Aren’t we haughty and withdrawn at one moment and affectionate, tender, loving at another? Don’t we conceal the hook with every sort of bait only to watch the fish sniff at it and turn away. Ah, if you knew—I feel a traitor to my sex even in telling you—if you guessed how we angle for you and how clever we are, how full of wiles! There’s an expression I once heard my husband use which describes us women exactly or nine out of ten of us. I wanted to know how he kept the office warm all night: he said, we damp down the furnaces and explained the process: that’s it, I cried to myself, I’m a damped-down furnace: that’s surely why I keep hot so long! Did you imagine”, she asked, turning her flower-face all pale with passion half aside, “that I took off my hat that first day before the glass and turned slowly round with it held above my head, by chance? You dear innocent! I knew the movement would show my breasts and slim hips and did it deliberately hoping it would excite you and how I thrilled when I saw it did. “Why did I show you the bed in that room?” she added, “and leave the door ajar when I came back here to the sofa, but to tempt you and how heart-glad I was to feel your desire in your kiss. I was giving myself before you pushed my head back on the sofa-arm and disarranged all my hair!” she added pouting and patting it with her hands to make sure it was in order. “You were astonishingly masterful and quick,” she went on: “how did you know that I wished you to touch me then! Most men would have gone on kissing and fooling, afraid to act decisively. You must have had a lot of experience? You naughty lad!” “Shall I tell you the truth!” I said, “I will, just to encourage you to be frank with me. You are the first woman I have ever spent my seed in or had properly—” “Call it improperly, for God’s sake,” she cried laughing aloud with joy, “you darling virgin, you! Oh! how I wish I was sixteen again and you were my first lover. You would have made me believe in God. Yet you are my first lover”, she added quickly, “I have only learned the delight and ecstasy of love in your arms—” Our love-talk lasted for hours till suddenly I guessed it was late and looked at my watch; it was nearly seven-thirty: I was late for supper which started at half-past six! “I must go,” I exclaimed, “or I’ll get nothing to eat.”

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Oh, you wise boy!” she laughed, “don’t you see you are skipping the time I most desire you, and that’s not kind to either of us; is it?” “There’s still another way of evasion”, I said, “get me to withdraw before I come the first time, or get up immediately and syringe yourself with water thoroughly: water kills my seed as soon as it touches it—” “But how will that help if you go on half a dozen times more?” she asked. “Doctors say,” I replied, “that what comes from me afterwards is not virile enough to impregnate a woman: I’ll explain the process to you if you like; but you can take it, the fact is as I state it.” “When did you learn all this?” she asked. “It has been my most engrossing study,” I laughed, “and by far the most pleasureful!” “You dear, dear,” she cried, “I must kiss you for that.” “Do you know you kiss wonderfully?” she went on reflectingly, “with a lingering touch of the inside of the lips and then the thrust of the tongue: that’s what excited me so the first time” and she sighed as if delighted with the memory. “You didn’t seem excited,” I said half reproachfully, “for when I wanted another kiss, you drew away and said ‘tomorrow’! Why are women so coquettish, so perverse?” I added, remembering Lucille and Jessie. “I think it is that we wish to be sure of being desired,” she replied, “and a little too that we want to prolong the joy of it, the delight of being wanted, really wanted! It is so easy for us to give and so exquisite to feel a man’s desire pursuing us! Ah how rare it is”, she sighed passionately, “and how quickly lost! You’ll soon tire of your mistress”, she added, “now that I am all yours and thrill only for you” and she took my head in her hands and kissed me passionately, regretfully. “You kiss better than I do, Lorna! Where did you acquire the art, Madame?” I asked, “I fear that you have been a naughty, naughty girl!” “If you only knew the truth,” she exclaimed, “if you only knew how girls long for a lover and burn and itch in vain and wonder why men are so stupid and cold and dull as not to see our desire.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  As it so happened, I had gone to the saloon with him on his promise that he would only drink one glass, and though the glass would be full of forty-rod whisky, I knew it would have only a passing effect on Charlie’s superb strength. But it excited him enough to make him call up all the girls for a drink: they all streamed laughing to the bar, all save one. Naturally Charlie went after her and found a very pretty blond girl, who had a strain of Indian blood in her, it was said. At first she didn’t yield to Charlie’s invitation, so he turned away angrily, saying: “You don’t want to drink probably because you want to cure yourself or because you’re ugly where women are usually beautiful.” Answering the challenge the girl sprang to her feet, tore off her jacket and in a moment was naked to her boots and stockings. “Am I ugly?” she cried, pushing out her breasts, “or do I look ill, you fool!” and whirled around to give us the back view! She certainly had a lovely figure with fair youthful breasts and peculiarly full bottom and looked the picture of health. The full cheeks of her behind excited me intensely, I didn’t know why: therefore, it didn’t surprise me when Charlie, with a half-articulate shout of admiration, picked her up bodily in his arms and carried her out of the room. When I remonstrated with him afterwards, he told me he had a sure way of knowing whether the girl, Sue, was diseased or not. I contradicted him and found that this was his infallible test: as soon as he was alone with a girl, he pulled out ten or twenty dollars, as the case might be, and told her to keep the money. “I’ll not give you more in any case”, he would add: “now tell me, dear, if you are ill and we’ll have a last drink and then I’ll go. If she’s ill, she’s sure to tell you—see!” and he laughed triumphantly. “Suppose she doesn’t know she’s ill?” I asked: but he replied: “they always know and they’ll tell the truth when their greed is not against you.” For some time it looked as if Charlie had enjoyed his Beauty without any evil consequences, but a month or so later he noticed a lump in his right groin and soon afterwards a syphilitic sore showed itself just under the head of his penis. We had already started northwards, but I had to tell Charlie the plain truth. “Then it’s serious”, he cried in astonishment, and I replied. “I’m afraid so, but not if you take it in time and go under a rigorous regimen.” Charlie did everything he was told to do and always bragged that gonorrhea was much worse, as it is certainly more painful, than syphilis; but the disease in time had its revenge.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I soon got my arm round her and kept kissing her till she told me she had never known a man so greedy of kisses as I was. It was delicious flattery to me to speak of me as a man and in return I raved about her eyes and mouth and form; caressing her left breast I told her I could divine the rest and knew she had a lovely body. But when I put my hand up her clothes, she stopped me when I got just above her knee and said: “We’d have to be engaged before I could let you do that. Do you really love me?” Of course I swore I did, but when she said she’d have to tell her father that we were engaged to be married, cold shivers went down my back. “I can’t marry for a long time yet”, I said, “I’ll have to make a living first and I’m not very sure where I’ll begin.” But she had heard that an old man wished to adopt me and everyone said that he was very rich, and even her father admitted that I’d be “well fixed.” Meanwhile my right hand was busy: I had got my fingers to her warm flesh between the stockings and the drawers and was wild with desire; soon mouth on mouth I touched her sex. What a gorgeous afternoon we had! I had learned enough now to go slow and obey what seemed to be her moods. Gently, gently I caressed her sex with my finger till it opened and she leaned against me and kissed me of her own will, while her eyes turned up and her whole being was lost in thrills of ecstasy. When she asked me to stop and take my hand away, I did her bidding at once and was rewarded by being told that I was a “dear boy” and “a sweet” and soon the embracing and caressing began again. She moved now in response to my lascivious touchings and when the ecstasy came on her, she clasped me close and kissed me passionately with hot lips and afterwards in my arms wept a little and then pouted that she was cross with me for being so naughty. But her eyes gave themselves to me even while she tried to scold. The dinner bell rang and she said she’d have to go, and we made a meeting for afterwards on the top deck; but as she was getting up, she yielded again to my hand with a little sigh and I found her sex all wet, wet! She got down out of the boat by the main rigging and I waited a few moments before following her. At first our caution seemed likely to be rewarded, chiefly, I have thought since, because everyone believed me to be too young and too small to be taken seriously. But everything is quickly known on seaboard at least by the sailors.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I got up and washed and returned to bed; the cold water had quieted me; but soon by thinking of Lucille and her soft, hot, hairy “pussy”, I grew randy again and in this state fell asleep. Again I dreamed of Lucille and again I was trying, trying in vain to get into her when again the spasm of pleasure overtook me; I felt my seed spirting hot and—awoke. But lo! when I put my hand down, there was no seed, only a little moisture just at the head of my sex—nothing more. Did it mean that I could only give forth seed once? I tested myself at once: while picturing Lucille’s sex, its soft hot roundnesses and hairs, I caressed my sex, moving my hand faster up and down till soon I brought on the orgasm of pleasure and felt distinctly the hot thrills as if my seed were spirting, but nothing came, hardly even the moisture. Next morning I tested myself at the high jump and found I couldn’t clear the bar at an inch lower than usual. I didn’t know what to do: why had I indulged so foolishly? But next night the dream of Lucille came back again, and again I awoke after an acute spasm of pleasure, all wet with my own seed. What was I to do? I got up and washed and put cold water in a sponge on my testicles and sex and all chilled crawled back into bed. But imagination was master. Time and again the dream came and awakened me. In the morning I felt exhausted, washed-out and needed no test to assure me that I was physically below par. That same afternoon I picked up by chance a little piece of whipcord and at once it occurred to me that if I tied this hard cord round my penis, as soon as the organ began to swell and stiffen in excitement, the cord would grow tight and awake me with the pain. That night I tied up Tommy and gave myself up to thoughts of Lucille’s private parts: as soon as my sex stood and grew stiff, the whipcord hurt dreadfully and I had to apply cold water at once to reduce my unruly member to ordinary proportions. I returned to bed and went to sleep: I had a short sweet dream of Lucille’s beauties but then awoke in agony. I got up quickly and sat on the cold marble slab of the washing-stand. That acted more speedily than even the cold water; why? I didn’t learn the reason for many a year. The cord was effective, did all I wanted: after this experience I wore it regularly and within a week was again able to walk under the bar and afterwards jump it, able too to pull myself up with one hand till my chin was above the bar. I had conquered temptation and once more was captain of my body.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  We usually sat in a sort of rustic summerhouse in the garden. This afternoon Lucille was seated leaning back in an armchair right in front of the door, for the day was sultry-close, and when Edwards went, I threw myself on the doorstep at her feet: her dress clung to her form, revealing the outlines of her thighs and breasts seductively. I was wild with excitement. Suddenly I noticed her legs were apart; I could see her slim ankles. Pulses awoke throbbing in my forehead and throat: I begged for a kiss and got on my knees to take it: she gave me one; but when I persisted, she repulsed me, saying: “Non, non! sois sage!” As I returned to my seat reluctantly, the thought came, “put your hand up her clothes”; I felt sure I could reach her sex. She was seated on the edge of the chair and leaning back. The mere idea shook and scared me: but what can she do, I thought: she can only get angry. I thought again of all possible consequences: the example with E… came to encourage and hearten me. I leaned round and knelt in front of her smiling, begging for a kiss, and as she smiled in return, I put my hand boldly right up her clothes on her sex. I felt the soft hairs and the form of it in breathless ecstasy; but I scarcely held it when she sprang upright: “how dare you!” she cried trying to push my hand away. My sensations were too overpowering for words or act; my life was in my fingers; I held her cunt. A moment later I tried to touch her gently with my middle finger as I had touched E…: ’twas a mistake: I no longer held her sex and at once Lucille whirled round and was free. “I have a good mind to strike you”, she cried; “I’ll tell Mrs. Edwards”, she snorted indignantly. “You’re a bad, bad boy and I thought you nice. I’ll never be kind to you again: I hate you!” she fairly stamped with anger. I went to her, my whole being one prayer. “Don’t please spoil it all”, I cried. “You hurt so when you are angry, dear.” She turned to me hotly: “I’m really angry, angry”, she panted, “and you’re a hateful rude boy and I don’t like you any more”, and she turned away again, shaking her dress straight. “Oh, how could I help it?” I began, “You’re so pretty, oh, you are wonderful, Lucille.” “Wonderful”, she repeated, sniffing disdainfully, but I saw she was mollified. “Kiss me”, I pleaded, “and don’t be cross.” “I’ll never kiss you again”, she replied quickly, “you can be sure of that.” I went on begging, praising, pleading for ever so long, till at length she took my head in her hands, saying: “If you’ll promise never to do that again, never, I’ll give you a kiss and try to forgive you.”

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  The Socrates that appears in this passage is invested with powers that are characteristic of the traditional figure of the theios anēr: physical endurance, the ability to make oneself indifferent to sensations, and the power to absent oneself from the body and to concentrate all the soul’s energy on oneself. 32 But it should be understood that these powers are operative here in the quite particular game of Eros; they ensure the domination that Socrates is able to exercise over himself in the game; and hence they qualify him as the highest object of love to which young men might appeal, but at the same time, as the only one who can guide their love all the way to truth. Into the lover’s game where different dominations confronted one another (that of the lover seeking to get control of the beloved, that of the beloved seeking to escape, and seeking, by means of his resistance, to enslave the lover), Socrates introduces another type of domination: that which is exercised by the master of truth and for which he is qualified by the dominion he exercises over himself. Platonic erotics can thus be considered from three viewpoints. First, it is a way of responding to an inherent difficulty, for Greek culture, in relationships between men and boys: namely, the question of what status to give the latter as objects of pleasure. From this angle, Plato’s answer seems only more complex and more elaborate than those that might have been put forward in the various “debates” on love, or—by “Socrates”—in the texts of Xenophon. Actually, Plato resolves the difficulty of the object of pleasure by bringing the question of the loved individual back to the nature of love itself; by structuring the love relation as a relation to truth; by doubling it and placing it in the one who is loved as well as in the one who is in love; and by reversing the role of the loved young man, making him a lover of the master of truth. In this sense, one can say that it meets the challenge that was issued by Aristophanes’ fable: it gives the latter a true content.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  The one who is better versed in love will also be the master of truth; and it will be his role to teach the loved one how to triumph over his desires and become “stronger than himself.” In the love relation, and as a consequence of that relation to truth which now structures it, a new figure makes its appearance: that of the master, coming to take the place of the lover; moreover, this personage, through the complete mastery that he exercises over himself, will turn the game upside down, reverse the roles, establish the principle of a renunciation of the aphrodisia , and become, for all young men who are eager for truth, an object of love. This is doubtless the meaning that should be given to the description, in the last pages of the Symposium , of the relations that Socrates maintains not only with Alcibiades, but also with Charmides, the son of Glaucon; with Euthydemus, the son of Diocles; and with many others in addition. 31 The distribution of roles is completely reversed: it is the young boys—those who are beautiful, with many suitors—who are enamored of Socrates; they dog his footsteps, they try to seduce him, they would like very much to grant him their favors—that is, for him to communicate the treasure of his wisdom. They are in the position of erastes , and he, the old man with the ugly body, is in the position of eromenos . But what they are not aware of, and what Alcibiades discovers in the course of the famous “test,” is that Socrates is loved by them only to the extent that he is able to resist their seduction; which does not mean that he feels no love or desire for them, but that he is moved by the force of true love, and that he knows how truly to love the truth that must be loved. Diotima had said this before: it was he who was wisest of all on the subject of love. Henceforth the master’s wisdom (and no longer the boy’s honor) would mark both the object of true love and the principle that kept one from “yielding.”

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  In Platonic erotics, the beloved cannot settle into the position of object in relation to the other’s love, simply waiting to receive, by the terms of the exchange to which he is entitled (since he is loved), the counsel he needs and the knowledge to which he aspires. It is right that he should actually become a subject in this love relation. In fact, this is the reason for the reversal, toward the end of the third speech of the Phaedrus , that changes the focus of the discussion from the lover to the one who is loved. Socrates has described the journey, the fervor, and the suffering of the one who loves, and the hard struggle he has had to conduct in order to gain control of his team. Now he turns his attention to the loved one: the young boy’s companions have perhaps made him think that it is not good to yield to a lover; nevertheless he begins to accept the company of his lover; the latter’s presence excites him to distraction; he in his turn feels uplifted by the rising wave of desire, wings and plumage start to grow in his soul. 29 Of course, he still does not know the true nature of that which he longs for, and he finds no words with which to name it; but he “throws his arms” around his lover and “gives him kisses.” 30 This moment is important: unlike what occurs in the art of courtship, the “dialectic of love” in this case calls for two movements exactly alike on the part of the two lovers; the love is the same for both of them, since it is the motion that carries them toward truth. 4. From the virtue of the loved boy to the master’s love and wisdom . In the art of courtship, it fell to the lover to do the wooing; and even though he was expected to keep control of himself, it was clear that the compelling force of his love risked overcoming him in spite of himself. The solid point of resistance was the boy’s honor, his dignity, the reasonable obstinacy with which he might refuse. But from the moment when Eros appeals to truth, it is the one who is the more advanced on the road of love, the one who is more truly enamored of truth, who will best be able to guide the other and help him to keep from degrading himself in all the base pleasures.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  In the traditional debate, the starting point for inquiry was on the side of the love object itself: given what the person whom one loved was, and what he was supposed to be—the beauty not only of his body but of his soul, the education that he needed, the free, noble, manly, and courageous character he must acquire—what form of love was honorable, for him and for the lover? It was respect for the beloved, for his real nature, that ought to give its own form and its sober style to whatever one might ask of him. In the Platonic inquiry, on the other hand, it is reflection on the nature of love itself that ought to lead to a true determination of its object. Beyond the different beautiful objects that the amorous individual may become attached to, Diotima shows Socrates that love seeks to beget spiritual children, and to contemplate “absolute beauty” in its true nature, in its unalloyed purity, and in the “oneness of its form.” And in the Phaedrus , it is Socrates himself who shows how the soul, if it has a strong enough memory of what it has seen beyond the heavens, if it is energetically driven, and if it does not allow impure appetites to rob it of its momentum, will attach itself to the beloved object only insofar as the latter reflects and imitates beauty itself. One does find in Plato the theme that love should be directed to the soul of boys rather than to their bodies. But he was not the first or the only one to say this. It was a theme that ran through the traditional discussions on love, with consequences that varied in their rigor. Attributing the theme to Socrates, Xenophon gives it a radical form. What is peculiar to Plato is not the dichotomy, but the way in which he establishes the inferiority of love for bodies. He bases this notion not on the dignity of the boy who is loved, but on that which, in the lover himself, determines the nature and form of his love (his desire for immortality, his yearning for the beautiful in its purity, the recollection of what he has seen beyond the heavens). Moreover (and both the Symposium and the Phaedrus are quite explicit on this point), he does not trace a clear, definitive, and uncrossable dividing line between the bad love of the body and the glorious love of the soul; however devalued and inferior the relation to the body compared with that motion toward beauty, and however dangerous it can sometimes be since it cannot deflect and stop that motion, it is not excluded out of hand or condemned for all time.

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

  The place of pederasty in Leucippe and Clitophon, which is important enough to frame the first quarter of the novel, helps us to situate contemporary attitudes to pederasty in terms of high imperial culture, rather than in comparison to classical Greece. A heightened and almost impolitic insistence on the physical essence of love, an awareness that the beloved’s consent could not be squared with social honor, and narratives of eros that sought to understand the place of mankind’s sexual instincts within the cosmos: these, rather than disapproval or disinvestment, make up the story of pederasty in the Roman Empire. 8 The Greeks and Romans of this period believed that beauty resided in the male as well as the female body, and they were never surprised when the sight of a beautiful body aroused sexual desire. “Did you never feel eros for someone, for a boy or girl, slave or free?” A farcical tale of travel to the afterlife imagined that on the Isle of the Blessed, “all the wives are shared in common without jealousy … and the boys all submit to their pursuers without resistance.” Pastoral poetry, meant to evoke an idealized harmony between man and nature, made boys the object of erotic attraction, from Virgil (who was said to be more fond of boys than of women) to Nemesianus, a court poet of the late third century. Marcus Aurelius, who learned from his adoptive grandfather to “cease all things concerned with the love of youths,” thanked the gods that he had touched “neither Theodotus nor Benedicta”—the casual indifference to the gender of the erotic object is what is telling. The traditional myths still held that even the gods were sexually indiscriminate: Zeus became a swan for Leda, but an eagle for Ganymede: “some think one or the other is greater, but they’re equal to me.” 9 Age dynamics were at the core of acceptable same-sex love in the Roman world. The “short season of rejoicing” was the span of time between early adolescence and the growth of the first beard. In the wry words of a witty courtesan, “boys are beautiful so long as they look like females.” The physiological boundaries of pederasty were flexible, if inexorable, indeed a symbol of evanescence: “time, which lays waste to beauty.” Sixteen to eighteen were the canonically acceptable years, propriety decreasing by degrees with distance from this window, without firm breaks. A mischievous poet from the age of Hadrian was indiscreetly precise: the age of seventeen marked a sort of perfection reserved for Zeus himself; after that, he said, there was a risk the boy might turn the tables. It was a traditional charge: by twenty, when the boy had a bristling chin, there was too much suspicion of alternating sexual roles. But in Lucian’s satirical account of an all-male society on the moon, the boys played the part of wives until twenty-five, then entered the ranks of the husbands. 10 The notion of “Greek love” is misleading on two counts.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  A thought: If this were fiction, a good editor would scratch this scene out. She continued. I’ve had a crush on you since the trial, she said. I’d love to date you. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We went out the next Saturday, the last day of April. I parked on the street outside the city park where we’d agreed to meet. Nora waited for me on a bench by the reflecting pool. She had a fresh haircut. It was tidy around her ears, trimmed close along the back of her head. I thought about dragging my fingers up, nape to crown, against the prickle of her hair. I could do that now, if I wanted to. She wanted me to touch her, didn’t she? She was here. She sat at one end of the bench, and I sat down at the other. We were too far apart, weirdly far apart. Nausea swam around my gut like a strange fish. I brought something for you, she said. It’s my favorite book about writing. Do you have it? She handed me a package wrapped in twine. It was a paperback copy of On Writing Well, by William Zinsser. I didn’t have it. On the title page, she’d written the date and an inscription. Her handwriting was even and relaxed, the M of my name a cheerful zigzag, the o flowing into looping ls, a neat up-and-down y. She had written my name! I goggled at it, like a preteen running into her school crush in the toothpaste aisle at Target: Whoa, he brushes his teeth, just like me. Nora had written my name. This is what it looks like when her hand forms my name! I couldn’t look directly at her, or the web of muscle at the corner of my eye would seize. For a while we talked about the weather, which was unseasonably warm. Nora had rolled her jeans once at the hem, where they rested on the creased cowboy boots she’d worn in court. I stared at a hedge in front of me, noticed that its leaves were the size and shape of almonds. We set off for a bar. Walking beside her, I saw that she wasn’t as tall as I’d thought. I realized I’d never done this before: I’d never walked beside her. It felt different from walking beside anyone else. I was walking beside Nora. I was walking beside a woman who was gay, and who looked gay, and I was not walking beside this woman because she was my friend. I was walking beside her because we wanted to put our tongues in each other’s mouths.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Please tell Irene I said hello.” “I will.” Rusty was willing to bet the pleasant maid or the good hairdresser would prefer cash, but a gift was better than nothing. “Rusty, darling,” Irene said, handing her four compacts and two Ronsons. “Could you gift-wrap these for Mrs. Delaney? Red ribbon.” Red ribbon was a code for Christmas, not Hanukkah, which would be blue ribbon. Rusty knew Mrs. Delaney’s son, a good-looking guy who worked at the branch bank on Elmora Avenue. He always flirted with her. Sometimes she flirted back, just to keep up her skills, though she knew he was married with four children. Not to mention Catholic. SteveA few blocks down East Jersey Street from the Martin Building, where Steve Osner’s father had his dental office and you could get a great-tasting burger at Three Brothers Luncheonette, Steve was shooting baskets at the YMHA with his best buddy, Phil Stein, both of them seniors at Thomas Jefferson High. They’d been born two weeks apart at Elizabeth General Hospital and bar mitzvahed a week apart at Temple B’nai Israel, across the street from the Y. A couple of regulars were playing with them in a pickup game, and one of them must have brought Mason McKittrick. He seemed like a nice enough kid, not that Steve knew him well, since he was just a junior, but he had good moves and a great hook. “You should go out for the team next year,” Steve told him. “Bet you could make varsity.” “I work after school,” Mason said, “at Edison Lanes—not much time for practice.” “You set up pins?” “Yeah, that and other stuff when it gets busy.” “I’ll look for you next time we go bowling.” “You in a league?” “No, just bowl for fun.” Mason nodded. In the locker room, Steve asked Phil, “You want to grab a burger at Three Brothers? I’m starving.” “Nah. My mother’s probably got dinner in the oven.” “Okay, but come over later.” “You have a plan?” “Don’t tell me you forgot already?” “Remind me.” “My sister’s party.” “We’re going to your sister’s party?” Steve swatted him with his damp towel. “I have to chaperone. My mother thinks if I’m around there won’t be any trouble. What a joke! Remember ninth grade? That’s the first time I copped a feel.” “You were always ahead of the rest of us,” Phil said. If only that were still true, Steve thought. A lot of the guys talked about how much they were getting. Their girlfriends let them touch and look. Steve had touched but no one had ever let him look. He didn’t have a regular girlfriend. He liked playing the field. Maybe he just hadn’t met the right girl yet. He knew girls who’d invite you into their houses to neck on the sofa in the living room, but it never went any further than that. Maybe he was doing something wrong. It might be different if they went to a coed high school.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Well, triple and a half, since Takumi will be there, too. Very low pressure. You won’t be able to screw up, because I’ll be there the whole time.” “Okay.” “Who’s my date?” the Colonel asked. “Your girlfriend is your date.” “All right,” he said, and then deadpanned, “but we don’t get along very well.” “So Friday? Do you have plans for Friday?” And then I laughed, because the Colonel and I didn’t have plans for this Friday, or for any other Friday for the rest of our lives. “I didn’t think so.” She smiled. “Now, we gotta go do dishes in the cafeteria, Chipper. God, the sacrifices I make.” eighty-seven days before OUR TRIPLE-AND-A-HALF DATE started off well enough. I was in Alaska’s room—for the sake of getting me a girlfriend, she’d agreed to iron a green button-down shirt for me—when Jake showed up. With blond hair to his shoulders, dark stubble on his cheeks, and the kind of faux-ruggedness that gets you a career as a catalog model, Jake was every bit as good-looking as you’d expect Alaska’s boyfriend to be. She jumped onto him and wrapped her legs around him (God forbid anyone ever does that to me, I thought. I’ll fall over ). I’d heard Alaska talk about kissing, but I’d never seen her kiss until then: As he held her by her waist, she leaned forward, her pouty lips parted, her head just slightly tilted, and enveloped his mouth with such passion that I felt I should look away but couldn’t. A good while later, she untangled herself from Jake and introduced me. “This is Pudge,” she said. Jake and I shook hands. “I’ve heard a lot about ya.” He spoke with a slight Southern accent, one of the few I’d heard outside of McDonald’s. “I hope your date works out tonight, ’cause I wouldn’t want you stealin’ Alaska out from under me.” “God, you’re so adorable,” Alaska said before I could answer, kissing him again. “I’m sorry.” She laughed. “I just can’t seem to stop kissing my boyfriend.” I put on my freshly starched green shirt, and the three of us gathered up the Colonel, Sara, Lara, and Takumi and then walked to the gym to watch the Culver Creek Nothings take on Harsden Academy, a private day school in Mountain Brook, Birmingham’s richest suburb. The Colonel’s hatred for Harsden burned with the fire of a thousand suns. “The only thing I hate more than rich people,” he told me as we walked to the gym, “is stupid people. And all the kids at Harsden are rich, and they’re all too stupid to get into the Creek.” Since we were supposed to be on a date and all, I thought I’d sit next to Lara at the game, but as I tried to walk past a seated Alaska on my way to Lara, Alaska shot me a look and patted the empty spot next to her on the bleachers.