Disgust

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.

Page 30 of 90 · 20 per page

• From Escape (2007)

  One Saturday morning Merril called everyone for morning prayers. When I didn’t show up, he sent one of his daughters to find me. My bed was empty because I’d gone for an early morning bike ride. But she lied and told Merril I was still in bed and refused to come to prayers. Merril said it was obvious that I had no interest in doing what my husband wanted, and he berated me in front of his family. After prayers, he walked out of the house to go to breakfast with some other men. He saw me ride my bike into the yard. When I went to put it away, he approached me. He began laughing. “I was told this morning you were sleeping and refusing to get up. I just told the entire family you were a lazy pig with no interest in doing what your husband wants.” I didn’t know why he was telling me this. Was he trying to intimidate me? He’d smeared me to his family and now was making it into a big joke. I told him it was too bad he felt this way toward me. I walked toward the house without turning back. I was beyond disgusted with Merril and his family. I had figured out, though, that if I wanted to be able to smart off to him, I had to start right from the beginning of the marriage. I’d never get away with it if I waited and started later. I knew that when Merril attacked me, it was like dumping blood and chum in the water and that the sharks would soon swim around. But how much worse could it really get? I was in my bedroom for a few minutes when I heard a knock on the door. It was one of Barbara’s daughters asking me to come to the kitchen to meet with her. I told the child I’d be there in a moment. Two minutes later she was back. “Mother wants to invite you to help her and all of the girls in cleaning the kitchen.” I told her I had a few things to finish first. I locked my door and climbed out my bedroom window and went to my father’s house, where I remained for the rest of the day. I knew there would be repercussions for my misbehavior, but it was better than being the family scapegoat. My family knew how unhappy I was in my marriage but offered little consolation. My parents didn’t like to see me upset, but they also believed that my marriage was a revelation from God.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Along the long hardwood hall, with its expensive rug thrown down the middle, more pictures. Upstairs, the home is shut-in and close. Downstairs, there are so many windows, so much clear light, but here it’s a cocoon, a hollow. She passes the boy’s room. On the other side of his door, there is silence. He will not move until someone comes for him. It is his nature. The girl’s door is ajar. Sylvia peers inside. Her low bed, her toys scattered everywhere. A lilac curtain thrown open. Pale light. Her sheets have been dragged from her bed. There is an ugly stain on them, something yellowing, already smelling sour. Sylvia will have to attend to this before the parents return. She leaves the doorway and turns to the parents’ bedroom. There, sure enough, the door is also ajar. Sylvia hears a repetitive creaking. She pushes the door open. The girl throws herself into the air, lands on her back, and bounds back up. “What the hell are you doing?” The girl does not answer. She uses the bed as a trampoline. The Martins have blackout curtains, and there’s just a sliver of light coming in through the tiny space between them. Everything is all velvet upholstery. It’s the sort of room that needs torchlight, which seems incongruous with the sort of brightness that overhead lighting offers. Still, Sylvia flips the switch, and the room is bathed in a harsh white light. The girl is naked. There are scratches up and down her arms, around her back. Her face is blank. She’s lands on her back, climbs to her feet, leaps again into the air, getting God knows what all over the duvet and pillows. There are twigs and dirt in her hair. How has she done this to herself? She looks like a wild thing. “Little beast,” Sylvia says. The girl makes no attempt to stop bouncing. Sylvia grabs her bare ankle. The girl begins to scream, to screech, to holler, to tear at Sylvia’s hands and arms and face. She is strong, and it takes all of Sylvia’s strength to hold her down, to shake her into stillness. “What is your problem?” She gazes up at Sylvia, and for a moment Sylvia thinks she can understand the girl. She knows what it is to be trapped inside a thing, inside a life. She knows what it is to want to tear a hole in everything. But still there is something else. This girl seems bound by nothing at all, except for the moment by Sylvia. There is nothing that can keep her inside herself. It’s the kind of life Sylvia would like to live, but she knows it’s the kind of life that is impossible because the world can’t abide a raw woman. “I know it’s hard,” Sylvia says to the girl. “But you have to try.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  But before she can conjure sufficient self-pity, something pulls at her shirt like she’s been caught on a nail or stray corner. She cracks her eyes open and sees the girl, who’s got the hem of Sylvia’s shirt gripped tight. Sylvia smiles at first. The desperate tension of the girl’s grip sends a little thrill through Sylvia’s stomach. She feels needed. But then she spies the brown clay sticking to the girl’s fingers. Flecked through with green and black. The girl shifts her hands around Sylvia’s shirt, and the motion changes something in the air current between them. Sylvia catches the scent. Dog shit. “What are you doing?” Sylvia asks. She marvels at the cool distance in her voice. How mature and far away she sounds to herself. The girl doesn’t even seem pleased with what she’s done. She’s no gloater. There is that to say for her. The girl spreads her fingers and clenches them shut again like she’s making a point. It would be nothing, would take nothing, to rend this girl to pieces. Sylvia feels in this moment like the grandmother who is part wolf. She’d gobble the little girl down and keep her there. Instead, she takes the girl’s wrist and leads her into the living room. The boy sits quietly with his coloring. “Stay,” Sylvia says to him when his eyes track toward them. She winds through the piles of toys and cushions. The living room resembles not so much a battlefield as one of those emptied-out neighborhoods in a dying Rust Belt town. There’s a sense of order having been overrun by chaos and wreckage. Work for later. Before the parents return. This is what they have been doing while they have been coloring. The sliding door is cracked open. No doubt it is the opening the girl slipped through in order to find her little surprise. This, Sylvia thinks, is what they consider being quiet and good. • • • In the bathroom, Sylvia runs water into the sink while the girl stares ahead. No fear. No remorse. Good for you is what Sylvia almost says. The water steams as it collects, turning the mirror ghostly white. Beneath the fog, Sylvia: Raw eyes, oily skin. Frizzed out, frayed at the edges, stained. This is not the first mishap of the week.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Like a bolt of lightning. There and gone, but behind it an acrid, burning trail. But before she can conjure sufficient self-pity, something pulls at her shirt like she’s been caught on a nail or stray corner. She cracks her eyes open and sees the girl, who’s got the hem of Sylvia’s shirt gripped tight. Sylvia smiles at first. The desperate tension of the girl’s grip sends a little thrill through Sylvia’s stomach. She feels needed. But then she spies the brown clay sticking to the girl’s fingers. Flecked through with green and black. The girl shifts her hands around Sylvia’s shirt, and the motion changes something in the air current between them. Sylvia catches the scent. Dog shit. “What are you doing?” Sylvia asks. She marvels at the cool distance in her voice. How mature and far away she sounds to herself. The girl doesn’t even seem pleased with what she’s done. She’s no gloater. There is that to say for her. The girl spreads her fingers and clenches them shut again like she’s making a point. It would be nothing, would take nothing, to rend this girl to pieces. Sylvia feels in this moment like the grandmother who is part wolf. She’d gobble the little girl down and keep her there. Instead, she takes the girl’s wrist and leads her into the living room. The boy sits quietly with his coloring. “Stay,” Sylvia says to him when his eyes track toward them. She winds through the piles of toys and cushions. The living room resembles not so much a battlefield as one of those emptied-out neighborhoods in a dying Rust Belt town. There’s a sense of order having been overrun by chaos and wreckage. Work for later. Before the parents return. This is what they have been doing while they have been coloring. The sliding door is cracked open. No doubt it is the opening the girl slipped through in order to find her little surprise. This, Sylvia thinks, is what they consider being quiet and good. • • • IN THE BATHROOM, Sylvia runs water into the sink while the girl stares ahead. No fear. No remorse. Good for you is what Sylvia almost says. The water steams as it collects, turning the mirror ghostly white. Beneath the fog, Sylvia: Raw eyes, oily skin. Frizzed out, frayed at the edges, stained. This is not the first mishap of the week. The girl coughs and smears dog shit across her face. No reaction. Sylvia’s fingertips sting when she dips the cloth into the water. She reaches over and takes the girl’s chin in hand without pretense of being gentle or trying to explain to her in a child’s voice why what she’s done is wrong.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  You can cry quietly, or you can howl. You can scream softly, or you can pierce the air like a missile. But silence is just silence. It doesn’t sound any different no matter how deep it is. It doesn’t look like anything you or anyone else can see, especially when you don’t look in mirrors anymore. If I didn’t look at myself, I could pretend that nothing had changed. But silence smells: his sour, astringent acne cream biting the cold air, hot salty semen and rank sweat like burning rubber. Silence feels, too, like you’ve swallowed rocks, especially when your throat is bruised from where his elbow crushed it even though it didn’t leave a mark, and it feels like his sticky mouth all over your face, his tongue like thick meat, slimy and choking, his spit dried rough on your cheeks. That wasn’t rape, though, as I understood it then: he hadn’t put his penis in my vagina when I didn’t want him to. I don’t think I had ever even heard the term “sexual assault,” but I know now that’s what it was. At the time it was just me making a bad choice by getting into his car in the first place. As Sylvia Webb’s father told her after she was raped by the clown, “you reap what you sow.” Same letters, different order: reap, rape. When I was raped, two years later, actually penis-in-my-vagina raped, it wasn’t a stranger in a clown mask. It wasn’t a stranger at all. It was someone who took what he wanted, because the world taught him that when it came to women’s bodies, he could do just that. Senior year of high school: I had been drinking and I was semiconscious on a bed at a friend’s house, my leg in a knee brace after a skiing accident. A guy I knew came into the room. I opened my eyes slowly. He was putting a condom on with one hand and reaching for my underwear with the other. I tried to push him off, saying, “No, no, please no,” but there was nothing I could do: I couldn’t walk without crutches, I had been drinking, I wasn’t strong enough, I couldn’t get away. Hot pain flashed through my whole body. I felt a burning surge in my face, my fingers, my toes. After he was done, I turned on my side, crying, drawing the leg that would bend up into my chest, seeing with half-closed eyes the bloody condom coming off, milky liquid dripping onto the floor. He looked at me and grinned. “What are you cryin’ for? You said ‘please.’ You were fuckin’ beggin’ for it!” I told no one. It wasn’t a stranger in a clown mask, but I knew that time that it was rape, and that it was my fault, for drinking, for hurting my leg, for being a girl. Reap, rape.

• From Escape (2007)

  After the meeting was over, there would be a pizza party at the home of Rulon’s son, Leroy. Leroy was the one we thought had the greatest likelihood of becoming the next prophet after Uncle Rulon’s death. The first one I went to sent my head spinning. There was pizza, to be sure, but there was also fried chicken and lots of junk food. But people didn’t go for the food, they went for the alcohol. Men sat in the dining room around a large table and the women stayed in the living room. Vans of women would arrive about forty-five minutes before the men. These were the wives of the most respected men in the FLDS, those in the priesthood. Many came carrying babies in their arms. But that didn’t stop them from hitting the beer—not even the nursing mothers. I was disgusted watching women drinking beer and nursing their babies at the same time. They rarely ate because there was a rigid rule in the Jeffs family against becoming obese. When the men arrived, they sat down in the dining room and expected to be served food. I was taking orders for pizza or chicken and bringing them drinks. I went into the living room to see if any of the other wives would be willing to help me, but they were too drunk. After several bottles of beer, they were laughing and preaching the gospel about keeping sweet and loving your sister wives. When they arrived at the party they’d seemed nervous and irritable, but not now. I thought maybe that was why their husbands let them drink. After a few beers, the men’s mood changed, too. Now they started complaining about their wives. Even Uncle Rulon joined in. He started bitching about one of his wives who was obese after having sixteen kids, which he felt was a sign of pure rebellion toward him. The other men jumped in, ranting and raving about their fat wives, too. I was disgusted by what I was seeing. These were the elite in the FLDS. It shocked me to see those who were held in such high esteem within the community exalting in things they all knew were punishable by excommunication. This was something new to add to the list of ugly realities I had seen within the faith I once prized. Tammy’s Failed Rebellion Carolyn, I’m pregnant.” Tammy and I were in the kitchen. I was getting a quick cup of coffee before heading back to school. I was shocked by the news. Was this for real? Tammy had been trying to get pregnant for six years. Fertility drugs hadn’t worked. Her desperation had increased to the point that rarely a day went by that she didn’t say something to me about it. I knew she’d finally abandoned the Clomid and for the last few months had been taking an herbal tincture a friend recommended.

• From Escape (2007)

  One morning my phone rang. It was Cathleen. “Have you heard the news?” I told her I’d been sound asleep. “Turn on the TV. We’ve just been attacked. They hit the World Trade Center in New York.” “Who hit the Trade Center?” I asked. “No one knows yet. All we know is that the towers came down and thousands of people were killed.” I don’t think she’d seen pictures; no one in Colorado City had a television. Cathleen had heard about it at work from people who listened to the radio. Warren Jeffs’ followers were some of the few people in the world who never saw coverage of the 9/11 attacks. I turned on the television and saw the replay of the towers collapsing. It was beyond comprehension. The images were sickening. It was hard to watch, harder not to watch. The pictures burned through to my soul. I, like so many others, had thought America was invulnerable. It was upsetting to me to see Arabs dancing in the streets because of the 9/11 attacks. I had a hard time watching people rejoice over killing and death even though I knew they hated us. What was worse was the reaction from people in Colorado City. Tammy came to visit me with several of Merril’s daughters in the aftermath of 9/11. She couldn’t stop talking about how she and all the righteous people she knew saw the hand of God in the attacks. The Lord’s people had finally proven worthy enough for God to answer their prophet’s prayers. The destruction of the towers was just the beginning. Warren Jeffs had been preaching that the entire earth would soon be at war and all the worthy among the chosen would be lifted from the earth and protected, while God destroyed the wicked. Tammy’s fanaticism was as idiotic to me as the Islamic extremism of the men who’d flown the planes into the twin towers. I had been taught as a child that only the wicked would be destroyed before the beginning of the thousand years of peace. Thousands of ordinary citizens had been murdered on 9/11, and it was impossible for me to see how anyone—even Warren Jeffs—could spin this as an act of God. Uncle Rulon had encouraged us to pray for the destruction of the wicked. I never could pray for harm to come to anyone else. Watching the smoldering ruins at Ground Zero and listening to the final, frantic cell phone calls of those trapped in the towers made me know in the deepest part of my being that only the wicked could rejoice in a tragedy like this—which didn’t say much for my own community. My doctor was pleased when I made it to thirty-one weeks—nine weeks short of a normal pregnancy. He thought the baby was doing well and said that he’d do a C-section when the placenta finally tore and I started to hemorrhage. Every day that my pregnancy continued made my baby healthier and stronger.

• From Escape (2007)

  At one point, Merril stopped at an ice cream stand and began buying cones. The children rushed to him like a flock of ducklings. Cathleen and I stopped and sat by the monkeys’ cage. I turned just in time to see one of the monkeys picking his nose and eating the mucus. I said to Cathleen, “Oh, gross, why did we have to sit here?” Cathleen said it was less gross than conditions on the bus. She didn’t understand how women such as Barbara, who had nine children, and Ruth, who had fourteen, could take no responsibility for them. We rode on a train that circled the zoo. We could see the larger animals from a distance in their natural habitats. Afterward we saw some of the big apes in their cages. One was carrying a small baby on his foot, and Merril said that was how he felt with his kids. The kids started calling each other “apes” and “baboons” as they slapped one another around. After a full day at the zoo, we herded the very tired but mostly happy children back to the hotel. We were due to start the two-day trip back to Colorado City in the morning. There was no talk about staying another day, although the kids would have loved it. One day was allotted for the zoo and four days for driving and that was that. Breakfast was simplified: there was no food. We’d run out. Merril sent his son Nathan out to buy fast food for the masses. None of the kids had any interest in eating the zillion bread sticks Cathleen and I had baked for the trip. As we were leaving San Diego, we became separated from the bus. Merril continued driving. This was in the days before cell phones, so for hours Merril would have no idea that the bus had broken down just outside San Diego. The younger children were tired and hungry from not having had enough to eat. The teenagers were cranky. Nathan left Cathleen and Faunita on the bus and went to find an auto shop. All he could do was call ahead to Merril’s construction company and leave a message about what had happened. A mechanic came and after a few hours, the bus was ready to roll again. The children were forced to eat bread sticks for their lunch and then for dinner. The small amounts of water and milk that remained were rationed. When Merril checked in with his construction company, he learned what had happened to the bus. He decided that we’d check into a hotel and wait for them. The place where we’d stayed on the trip west wouldn’t take us because of the way we’d trashed the rooms at breakfast.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances would he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row. But how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng, he espied a demon child, “enfant charmante et fourbe,” dim eyes, bright lips, ten years in jail if you only show her you are looking at her. So life went. Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for. The bud-stage of breast development appears early (10.7 years) in the sequence of somatic changes accompanying pubescence. And the next maturational item available is the first appearance of pigmented pubic hair (11.2 years). My little cup brims with tiddles. A shipwreck. An atoll. Alone with a drowned passenger’s shivering child. Darling, this is only a game! How marvelous were my fancied adventures as I sat on a hard park bench pretending to be immersed in a trembling book. Around the quiet scholar, nymphets played freely, as if he were a familiar statue or part of an old tree’s shadow and sheen. Once a perfect little beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavily armed foot near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me and tighten the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun, with my book for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her skinned knee, and the shadow of leaves I shared pulsated and melted on her radiant limb next to my chameleonic cheek. Another time a red-haired school girl hung over me in the métro, and a revelation of axillary russet I obtained remained in my blood for weeks. I could list a great number of these one-sided diminutive romances. Some of them ended in a rich flavor of hell. It happened for instance that from my balcony I would notice a lighted window across the street and what looked like a nymphet in the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror. Thus isolated, thus removed, the vision acquired an especially keen charm that made me race with all speed toward my lone gratification. But abruptly, fiendishly, the tender pattern of nudity I had adored would be transformed into the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper by the open window in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night. Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  It dawned on me (or rather sunset on me, for this recognition felt old, familiar, auburn) that Rachel loved me or would have had she met me at some more favorable moment in her life or mine, or had I been even a few years older. All these objections, and her proud fear of exposing her love to someone who might not welcome it, made her break off, sigh, fidget with her hair, strum the Duino Elegies and squint into already feeble sunlight further filtered by drawn curtains. That distant, scarcely audible whistle must belong to a coach on the playing fields half a mile away. Her chair creaked. Tim materialized, rubbing sleep and fever out of his eyes. He’d been kept home today with the flu. Without hesitation he climbed up onto my lap and butted his head dully, stubbornly against my chest, frustrated because he was sick. I sipped the hot coffee and smiled inwardly at the thought of this wife and this son I’d acquired, these phantom dependents. Sometimes I caught DeQuincey sneaking an unpleasant glance at me, but I knew he would never exile me or even antagonize me, for he needed me to placate his implacable wife. Once, only once, on a Saturday night we three drank two bottles of wine and we let the talk drift to sex. “Yeah,” DeQuincey said, “Rachel’s got her fantasies. She’d like—” “Shut up,” Rachel said without any particular emphasis. An incongruous smile flickered over her features. “Just shut up.” The smile suggested she was anticipating his next move, as a sitter lights up the moment before he is finally shown his portrait. “Yeah, Rachel wants two pricks, one in each hand.” I drew back inwardly at the terrible words and the smile that was leaking out of DeQuincey’s face like candlelight from a carved pumpkin. He had just given a haywire emphasis to the words two pricks that made me no longer think of him as a lovable, befuddled, overgrown preppy but rather as a man who had really had real mental breakdowns, whose imagination had festered. I looked for a reflection of my disgust in Rachel’s face, but she was grinning and staring at her accomplice, perhaps her impresario. There was an air about them of driven but thoroughly professional gamblers. He had just placed a roll of chips on a number. She more than matched him and pushed forward with both her small hands, slowly but firmly, all her remaining wealth. “Okay,” she said softly. Her terrible silent chuckle had begun. She spread her legs under the full skirt, planted her elbows on her knees and looked up at us. Her gaze was steady and provocative, although from time to time she had to steal a glance at the cue card to break the tension.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X I I The Demons, under their “great Marshal” Barbariccia, lead the way, along the edge of the boiling Pitch; and Dante, who keeps looking sharply, relates how he saw the Barrators lying in it, like frogs in ditch-water, with nothing but their “muzzles” out, and instantly vanishing at sight of Barbariccia; and how Graffiacane booked one of them and hauled him up like a fresh-speared otter, all the other Demons gathering round and provoking Rubicante to mangle the unlucky wretch. At Dante’s request, Virgil goes forward, and asks him who he is; and no sooner does the pitchy thief mention how he took to barratry in the service of worthy King Thibault of Navarre, than he is made to feel the bitter force of Ciriatto’s tusks. Barbariccia now clasps him with both arms, and orders the rest to be quiet, till Virgil has done with questioning. But “Scarletmoor” loses patience; “Dragon-face” too will have a clutch at the legs; Farfarello, “wicked Hell-bird” that he is, glares ready to strike; and their “Decurion” has difficulty in keeping them off. At last the cunning barrator, though Cagnazzo raises his dogface in scornful opposition, plays off a trick by which he contrives to escape. Thereupon Calcabrina and Alichino fall to quarrelling, seize each other like two mad vultures, and drop into the burning pitch; and the whole troop is left in fitting disorder. I HAVE ere now seen horsemen moving camp, and commencing the assault, and holding their muster, and at times retiring to escape; coursers have I seen upon your land, O Aretines! and seen the march of foragers, the shock of tournaments and race of jousts, now with trumpets, and now with bells, 1 with drums and castle-signals, and with native things and foreign: but never yet to so uncouth a cornet saw I cavaliers nor footmen move, nor ship by mark of land or star. We went with the ten Demons: ah, hideous company! but, “In church with saints, and with guzzlers in the tavern.” Yet my intent was on the pitch, to see each habit of the chasm and of the people that were burning in it. As dolphins, when with the arch of the back they make sign to mariners that they may prepare to save their ship: 2 so now and then, to ease the punishment, some sinner showed his back and hid in less time than it lightens. And as at the edge of the water of a ditch, the frogs stand only with their muzzles out, so that they hide their feet and other bulk: thus stood on every hand the sinners; but as Barbariccia approached, they instantly retired beneath the seething.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  I don't find it strange to want to display it—and without “modesty”—and to have it accepted, loved, admired. The interviewer: “Perhaps we can talk more about the hint of violence and toughness in your work and whether or not it's true of your own life.” I say: “I do cultivate a certain tough appearance because it attracts people sexually, and I do equate sex with power. But I know the difference between that and the most negative aspect within the gay world—S & M.” I have evoked another gay demon: sadomasochism and its fierce psychic grip on the gay world. Yes, we're in a highly mined territory. The interviewer's voice is agitated; he points out that he himself is not “into S & M.” And: “There can be a negativism.” But he verbalizes the most outrageous rationalization: “On the other hand I think pain can be an added dimension in a relationship.” I say: “One can justify eating dirt by claiming it intensifies one's closeness to the earth…. There would be commendable honesty in the S & M world if someone would admit: ‘I want to be hurt and humiliated because I hate myself.’ The hypocrisy comes when one calls it love. I find the inflicting of pain or the inviting of pain repugnant. I love the rush of being submitted to sexually—but that's different from inflicting pain.” The interviewer counters: “But don't you think it's possible in an ongoing relationship that pain—humiliation-can be an added dimension? I have no reason to disbelieve the people who have experienced it as such.” I say: “I do disbelieve it. Entirely. Pain and humiliation have nothing to do with love.” He asks me to speak about the “dynamic of hustling” in my own life. Thankfully, I'm not evasive, as I was in an earlier interview. This time I'm true to the streets: “I have a fierce need to hustle.” Nostalgia tugs at me. I remember past times: We wore blue jeans, tight T-shirts. We were all so butch, man, and we were proud. But streethustling is fading in elegance and style. Then, we never approached anyone, just waited to be courted, yes. Now, tacky hustlers peer into all cars, call out at the men driving around. Not all, of course, not all. “There's no rush like hustling,” I say. “Yet I'm aware that it's involved with repression.” “You feel there's a conflict between your feelings about gay liberation and your attraction to the hustling world?” He asks me whether I think that hustling and S & M can be reconciled to some extent with gay liberation. Hustling, perhaps; S & M, definitely not—though: “I would be dishonest if I said that there's love between the person who pays and the person paid.” “Are you speaking only of yourself?” he asks me pointedly. I answer: “About myself, but also about other hustlers.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  A Halloween party drew leather-bedecked “masters” and their “slaves”—pitiful, ugly, hooded, manacled creatures led on harnesses. Another ugly extreme of S & M is the burgeoning of a “group” calling itself the F.F.A. (Fist Fuckers of America). Why is S & M so powerful in the gay world? Given the crushing pressures and hatred from the outside world, wouldn't homosexuals move determinedly away from pain and humiliation? To the contrary, it is precisely because of the demons of religious, psychological, and legal repression that S & M thrives. The roots of this ritual are in the humiliation of gay children by heterosexuals. No gay child can totally escape the self-hatred powerfully implanted in his early years. When he reveals gay tendencies, he is humiliated, even physically tortured—called “queer,” “faggot,” “cock-sucker”—choice Christian names with which gay children are baptized. His homosexuality is inevitably branded with guilt. Carried into adulthood, that imposed guilt may easily push him into S & M in punishment and humiliation for his “evil.” If he becomes an “S,” he will pitifully imitate the very bully who perhaps taunted him. The ritual of S & M embraces the straight world's judgment, debasement, hatred, and contempt of and for the homosexual. In the gay world—where, as in the world of other minorities, there is a dangerous, but understandable, reticence to criticize anything within it—the very subject of S & M is charged with emotionalism. Some gay groups will not even allow critical discussion of it. In an interview with the editor of a gay-liberation newspaper, my negative remarks about S & M were heavily edited and in instances omitted. A university group recently presented a two-hour symposium on the joys of slavery—during its gay-liberation week! Even outside homosexual circles, gay S & M is defended by nouveau chic heterosexuals. Because, apparently, we have reached a time when it is fashionable to accept anything, no matter how destructive, as long as it qualifies— in the clinging phrase of the prehistoric sixties—as “far out.” Reactionary to put down fascism. I hear, increasingly, intellectualized defenses of Manson, even of Hitler. From there the defense of S & M is easy. We are not confounded by the paradox of opposing (correctly) police S & M and government S & M in genocide and yet supporting its charade. We find it difficult even to differentiate between speaking out against what is destructive, though willing, and legislating against it— no mutual consenting sex act should be outlawed.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Like Jim, many others here are shirtless, naked torsos, some smooth, some hairy, some tattooed, muscular or slim, oiled. Proud of his muscular chest, Jim squeezes through pressing bodies. Hands clutch at anyone. Occasionally a form slides down surreptitiously to blow random cocks of indifferent men who continue to drink without looking down. Paired too arbitrarily here by the churning bodies, Jim feels devoured within a mass of flesh. He leaves. The agitation is increasing. He keeps remembering the raid in the park, the youngman he was with. And, suddenly, Danny, the years-ago image destroyed yesterday. And he keeps thinking of the groveling man in the theater. In another bar: Again the bare torsos. Suddenly Jim sees the bodybuilder he left flexing in the bushes last night. Spotting Jim, he again adopts his favorite pose, face set, clenched fist at his forehead; clearly he expects Jim to answer him with a similar pose. “Oh, fuck,” Jim says aloud. He drives to the Turf Bar, a bar he has often cruised outside of but never been inside, knowing what it's like. Inside now, he regrets immediately that he came. The bar is deliberately meant to suggest a torture dungeon—chains, manacles, boots hang on the walls, ceilings. Most of the men, even in the hot, hot afternoon, are in heavy leather— or military costumes. Many of them are goodlooking; all determined, with varying degrees of success, to be masculine; some are ugly, absurdly wrong in the rigid uniforms. There is too much of charade in the ramrod poses, the forced low voices—an embarrassing veering toward male impersonation, especially among the most heavily leathered or militaristic; a feeling created of male drag—the studded instead of sequined belts; the tight leather pants, instead of tight vinyl skirts, both almost silky in their sheen. There is an electrified ugliness in this bar, of the rotting of fantasy. Jim turns to leave. Near the door he's intercepted by a man wearing a full cop uniform—glasses, helmet, even handcuffs. A heavy ring of keys dangles on his right side. A lowered voice out of the fake uniform offers to buy Jim a drink. Jim ignores him, reacting immediately negatively to the costume. “I make a good slave,” the cop-costumed figure offers. “Fuck you and your cop uniform,” Jim reacts angrily to the man's charade of the enemy. As Jim pushes the door to exit, two men in Nazi brown-shirt uniforms strut in. Why did I come here? Jim wonders in disgust, knowing he will never enter that bar again. Outside, he remembers Steve and Tony. Not the Steve he exchanged numbers with last night—no, another Steve. A memory which both excites and shames him. FLASHBACK: Somewhere in Los Angeles. Last Summer. The youngman, wiry, sexy, dark, moodily Italian with a boxer's tight body, had cruised him curiously from a distance all afternoon in Griffith Park. Finally, in the late afternoon, he approached him; would Jim come home with him?—he had a roommate…. Jim went.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Suddenly, looking at Tony as if whatever would happen now would be at least in part to torture him further, Steve spread his own legs in a wide V, as if to allow Jim to fuck him. Tony turned away. “Watch, you goddam queer!” Steve demanded. Jim lunged at Steve's asshole. Laughing loudly, Steve pulled away. Then he lay waiting again, his legs still spread, his eyes nailed on Tony. Again Jim pushed his cock at Steve's ass and entered it fully. “Oh, baby, yeah,” Steve moaned. Suddenly Jim pulled his cock out. He glanced at Tony; Tony was crying. Steve's legs still waited open, his hands holding the buttocks apart. Then a strange smile slashed his face as if he knew, already, what would happen—and was perverse enough to enjoy even that: Jim looked down at Steve, and with contempt said: “I don't want to fuck your goddamn ass!” Steve laughed hoarsely. Jim dressed, feeling as if the pulsing room were imploding in his head. He wanted desperately to breathe fresh air. He didn't know if it was day or not, or exactly where in Los Angeles he was. Steve still lay in bed, snorting what was left of the cocaine. Jim said: “I'm sorry I came here.” “Bullshit,” Steve said. Jim turned to Tony: “How can you stand that sick motherfucker?” Standing up fiercely, Tony exploded: “Don't you say anything about him! I don't want to hear you say anything about Steve!” Then, through tears: “I love him.” “Bullshit,” Steve repeated. He was still laughing when Jim left. Outside. It was morning. Standing in the white sun of Los Angeles, Jim thought the palmtreed city would explode before he reached his car. VOICE OVER: The Ugly Gay World VOICE OVER: The Ugly Gay World A T ITS BEST, the gay experience is liberating, adventurous, righteously daring, revolutionary, and beautiful in its sexual abundance. At its worst it is a stark vision of hell Stunning in its choreography, giving in its promiscuity, the hunt can turn brutal and raw. The elegant artistic sensibility can slide into bitchiness and bitter cruelty. The glamor can become grotesque. The beauty a haunted parody. Instant love, instant hate. Every indictment of the gay world is a stronger indictment of the straight. The heterosexual norm—marriage, children, home, property—is ingrained into homosexuals as the only possible means of happiness. Homosexuals are taught— by heterosexuals—to expect and even yearn for what, given societal attitudes, is impossible under a different lifestyle. Warring attempts to fuse heterosexual expectations with homosexual needs and realities create the contradictions in the gay world. No criticism of the gay world can be made outside that context; that the straight world has shaped the homosexual with threats of hideous “cures,” insane laws, and “moral” admonitions—attempting deliberately to transform him into a “sick, criminal sinner.” Beyond that important context—which must constantly be emphasized—what of the gay world itself? How is the inner revolution being waged? Gay liberation. Yes.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  A few dayes after, when the young man was buried and the funerall ended, the Physitians wife demanded of her the fifty peeces of gold which she promised her husband for the drinke, whereat the ill disposed woman, with resemblance of honesty, answered her with gentle words, and promised to give her the fifty peeces of gold, if she would fetch her a little of that same drinke, to proceed and make an end of all her enterprise. The Physitians wife partly to winne the further favour of this rich woman, and partly to gaine the money, ranne incontinently home, and brought her a whole roote of poyson, which when she saw, having now occasion to execute her further malice, and to finish the damnable plot, began to stretch out her bloody hands to murther. She had a daughter by her husband (that was poysoned) who according to order of law, was appointed heire of all the lands and goods of her father: but this woman knowing that the mothers succoured their children, and received all their goods after their death, purposed to shew her selfe a like parent to her child, as she was a wife to her husband, whereupon she prepared a dinner with her owne hands, and empoysoned both the wife of the Physitian and her owne daughter: The child being young and tender dyed incontinently by force of the drinke, but the Physitians wife being stout and strong of complexion, feeling the poison to trill down into her body, doubted the matter, and thereupon knowing of certainty that she had received her bane, ran forthwith to the judges house, that what with her cryes, and exclamations, she raised up the people of the towne, and promising them to shew divers wicked and mischievous acts, caused that the doores and gates were opened. When she came in she declared from the beginning to the end the abhomination of this woman: but shee had scarce ended her tale, when opening her falling lips, and grinding her teeth together, she fell downe dead before the face of the Judge, who incontinently to try the truth of the matter, caused the cursed woman, and her servants to be pulled out of the house, and enforced by paine of torment to confesse the verity, which being knowne, this mischievous woman farre lesse then she deserved, but because there could be no more cruell a death invented for the quality of her offence, was condemned to be eaten with wild beasts.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  « When we had thus lost two of our companions, we liked not Thebes, but marched towards the next city called Plataea, where we found great fame con- cerning a man named Demochares that purposed to set forth a great game, where should be a trial of ali kinds of weapons: he was come of a good house, marvellous rich, liberal, and well deserved that which he had, and had prepared many shews and pleasures for the common people : in so much that there is no man can either by wit or eloquence shew in fit words all the manifold shapes of his preparations, for first he had provided gladiators of a famous band, then all manner of hunters most fleet of foot, then guilty men without hope of reprieve who were judged for 168 14 LUCIUS APULEIUS epulis bestiarum saginas instruentes; confixilis ma- chinae sublieae, turres tabularum nexibus ad instar cireumforaneae domus, floridae picturae, decora fu- turae venationis receptacula. Qui praeterea numerus, quae facies ferarum! Nam praecipuo studio forin- secus etiam advexerat generosa illa damnatorum capi- tum funera, Sed praeter ceteram speciosi muneris supellectilem totis utcumque patrimonii viribus im- manis ursae comparabat numerum copiosum: nam praeter domesticis venationibus captas, praeter largis emptionibus partas, amicorum etiam donationibus variis certatim oblatas tutela sumptuosa sollicite nutriebat. Nec ille tam clarus tamque splendidus publicae voluptatis apparatus invidiae noxios effugit oculos: nam diutina captivitate fatigatae simul et aestiva flagrantia maceratae, pigra etiam sessione languidae, repentina correptae pestilentia paene ad nullum redivere numerum. Passim per plateas pluri- mas cerneres iacere semivivorum corporum ferina naufragia: tunc vulgus ignobile, quos inculta pau- peries sine delectu ciborum tenuato ventri cogit sordentia supplementa et dapes gratuitas conquirere, passim iacentes epulas accurrunt. ** Tune e re nata subtile consilium ego et iste Babu- lus tale comminiscimur: unam, quae ceteris sarcina corporis praevalebat, quasi cibo parandam portamus ad nostrum receptaculum eiusque probe nudatum carnibus corium, servatis sollerter totis unguibus, ipso etiam bestiae capite adusque confinium cervicis 164 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IV

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  It billed itself as “A Picture Book of Sex for Children and Parents” and consisted of black-and-white photographs and captions by an American named Will McBride, along with educational passages by European doctor Helga Fleischhauer-Hardt. Covering it for the New York Times , reviewer Linda Wolfe described paging through Show Me! with a mounting and palpable sense of alarm. “The photographs reveal the world of sex through the eyes of two exquisite noble savages of about 5 years of age,” she writes. “We puzzle with them over their bellybuttons and the fact that he has a penis and she a vagina. She turns bottoms-up so he can see close-up what she’s got, and he shows her how he ‘pees’ and ‘poops.’ ” Up until this point, Wolfe says, she still believed the book could be an asset to families. Then, it got weirder. “But soon these children are pondering the sexual behavior of their adolescent siblings. The boy has seen—and we see through his eyes—his teenage brother and a barely pubescent girlfriend having intercourse. The girl has watched her older sister rub her clitoris, and we see that, too.” The prose is tempered but it’s clear that Wolfe is so repulsed by Show Me! that the effect is borderline humorous. “One begins to suspect that the photographer enjoys scaring children,” she writes. “And throughout the book one grand and erroneous impression about sex in our society is conveyed: it is that sex is something which happens in public.” Wolfe was not alone in her impression of Show Me! Although the title was lauded in Germany, even SIECUS hesitated to recommend it. The September 1975 issue of the SIECUS Report opens with a cover story reiterating its position of sex education as a basic human right. But just pages later, Dr. E. James Lieberman’s review of McBride’s book implies that, human rights notwithstanding, there is still such a thing as bad sex ed. “This book poses a problem for enlightened parents and sex educators because those who oppose it presumably wear the black hat of sexual repression,” Lieberman begins. Yet he goes on to argue that in this case, negative reactions to Show Me! —with its explicit, close-up photos of everything from fellatio to childbirth—are probably justified. “There is no need to hustle children into an appreciation of adult sexuality, any more than we need to introduce caviar or Kantian philosophy at an early age,” he writes. “This delicious-looking book is indigestible, an oxymoronic oddity of rawness overdone: it is blandly erotic, childishly adult, somberly silly, elegantly gross.” Almost as soon as it was published in the States, Show Me! was challenged and subject to claims of obscenity. But it wasn’t until 1982, when the Supreme Court voted unanimously to uphold a New York State law barring child pornography, that St. Martin’s Press, the book’s US publisher, decided to withdraw it. In the New York Times , St.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  By early December, the school board had agreed to reconsider the issue. On Monday, December 3, the board convened and voted 5-2 in favor of reinstating Blume’s novels. However, it was a qualified victory, with the library setting up a new system where these books would only be available to older readers, and to younger ones with parental consent. One local mother, who’d spoken out against the bans, told reporters she was satisfied with this outcome. “This is what I first suggested as a compromise,” she said. “I feel that the action they took will address the rights of children and all parents.” The rhetoric of parental rights animated both sides of the conversation, with would-be book banners arguing that they had license to control what their kids were reading at school. That’s what happened in Gwinnett County, Georgia, in August 1985, when a local mom named Teresa Wilson asked to see the new book that her nine-year-old daughter, Naco, had borrowed from the school library. That October, she told the Chicago Tribune that she flipped Deenie open and immediately, she was disgusted. “The first page I opened to talked about masturbation,” she explained to a reporter. “That’s when I got involved.” Wilson described herself as a homemaker who had “never been involved in anything like this before.” Nonetheless, she sprung to action, contacting Naco’s school, the county school board, and—in a way that closely mirrored the fictional events described in Maudie and Me and the Dirty Book —founded a group called Concerned Citizens of Gwinnett. As is often the case when even just one parent challenges a book, local officials hurried to remove Deenie from the shelves. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Another committee, called the Free Speech Movement of Gwinnett, came together to fight the decision. It was led by George Wilson (no relation to Teresa). Gwinnett County is just outside Atlanta, and at the time it was home to twenty-three thousand elementary school students—all potential readers of novels by Judy Blume. George Wilson told the Tribune that both he and his ten-year-old daughter Katherine had read Deenie and he had no problem with it: “No one is obligated to read this book, but I want my child to have the option to go into the school library and pick out any book she wants, without someone else’s parent dictating what she can read.” He felt so strongly about the issue that he got the Georgia chapter of the ACLU involved. It went ahead and filed an appeal to the state school board. But that didn’t scare Teresa Wilson, who had also enlisted help from the Freedom Foundation—a conservative think tank—and the Moral Majority. Beyond that, she had connected with a Texas couple named Mel and Norma Gabler, whose organization Educational Research Analysts was devoted to ridding public schools of textbooks that conflicted with their fundamentalist Christian values. Wilson told the Tribune that with challenging Deenie , she was just getting started.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  I thought to find thee yet down below, where time for time is repaid.” 7 And he to me: “Thus soon hath led me to drink the sweet wormwood of the torments, my Nella by her flood of tears; by her prayers devout and by sighs she hath brought me from the borders where they wait, and set me free from the other circles. So much more precious and beloved of God is my dear widow, whom I loved so well, as she is the more lonely in good works; 8 for the Barbagia of Sardinia is far more modest in its women than the Barbagia where I left her. O sweet brother, what wouldst thou have me say? Already in my vision is a time to come to which this hour shall not be very old, when the brazen-faced women of Florence shall be forbidden from the pulpit to go abroad showing their breasts with the paps. 9 What Barbary, what Saracen women ever lived, to whom either spiritual or other discipline were necessary, to make them go covered? But if the shameless creatures were assured of what swift heaven is preparing for them, already would they have their mouths open to howl: for if prevision here beguile me not, they shall be sorrowing ere he shall clothe his cheeks with down, who now is soothed with lullaby. Pray, brother, look that thou hide thee no longer from me; thou seest that not only I, but all this people are gazing where thou veilest