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.

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• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  But when you looked at it up close, when you examined the pages separately, or the parts separately, when you examined one lone individual and what constituted him, examined the air he breathed, the life he led, the chances he risked, you saw something so foul and degrading, so low, so miserable, so utterly hopeless and senseless, that it was worse than looking into a volcano. You could see the whole American life—economically, politically, morally, spiritually, artistically, statistically, pathologically. It looked like a grand chancre on a worn-out cock. It looked worse than that, really, because you couldn’t even see anything resembling a cock any more. Maybe in the past this thing had life, did produce something, did at least give a moment’s pleasure, a moment’s thrill. But looking at it from where I sat it looked rottener than the wormiest cheese. The wonder was that the stench of it didn’t carry ‘em off. . . . I’m using the past tense all the time, but of course it’s the same now, maybe even a bit worse. At least now we’re getting it full stink. By the time Valeska arrived on the scene I had hired several army corps of messengers. My office at Sunset Place was like an open sewer, and it stank like one. I had dug myself into the first-line trench and I was getting it from all directions at once. To begin with, the man I had ousted died of a broken heart a few weeks after my arrival. He held out just long enough to break me in and then he croaked. Things happened so fast that I didn’t have a chance to feel guilty. From the moment I arrived at the office it was one long uninterrupted pandemonium. An hour before my arrival—I was always late—the place was already jammed with applicants. I had to elbow my way up the stairs and literally force my way in to get to my desk. Before I could take my hat off I had to answer a dozen telephone calls. There were three telephones on my desk and they all rang at once. They were bawling the piss out of me before I had even sat down to work. There wasn’t even time to take a crap—until five or six in the afternoon. Hymie was worse off than I because he was tied to the switchboard. He sat there from eight in the morning until six, moving waybills around. A waybill was a messenger loaned by one office to another office for the day or a part of the day. None of the hundred and one offices ever had a full staff; Hymie had to play chess with the waybills while I worked like a madman to plug up the gaps. If by a miracle I succeeded of a day in filling all the vacancies, the next morning would find the situation exactly the same—or worse.

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

  e fact that stares out at us from the speech is the utter centrality of prostitution in the social life of the high Roman Empire. Prostitution was the fi xed point in Dio’s roaring diatribe against contemporary society, and on it hung all the ills and disorders of the world. It was an established tenet of Stoic psychology that indulgence was self- reinforcing. Normally, though, these refl ections focused on the individual. Dio turned to consider the circulation of plea sure through the social body, and his attention was locked on the vicious spiral of a society geared to deliver sexual satisfaction cheaply and easily. In the thought of Dio, Stoic skepticism toward pleasure is suddenly refracted through a panoramic vision of society. Prostitution was, for Dio, symptomatic of civilizational disorder. In the “Euboean Oration,” Dio launched a frontal attack on the timeworn rationalization of prostitution as a safety valve for dangerous sexual energy. Stoic psychology gave Dio a powerful rejoinder to the assumption that male sexual energy was a determinate quantum. Th e rulers were wrong to think they had discovered “a sexual- restraint drug” in the “open, unlocked brothels” of the city. Dio argued that men would inevitably become bored with the pleasures that could be had “with permission, at a negligible rate,” and turn their amatory energy to the “freeborn women,” locked in inner cham-bers. Sexual lust was a self- accelerating force, and far from staving off the violation of respectable women, prostitution fueled the desires that would inevitably lead to adulteries. Th e “open, dishonorable violation,” even of prostitutes, led straight to the corruption of “respectable women and boys.” Once unbridled, sexual lust could ultimately only lead to sexual ruin— the corruption of wives and the submission of sons. In the “Euboean Oration,” Dio proved himself willing to contemplate the social matrix of desire with a frankness and objectivity that was surpassingly rare. His train of reasoning led him to the precipice of an epochal moral insight. Th e sexual economy rested on the “women and boys taken captive or bought, prostituted for shameful purposes in sordid brothels, which are apparent everywhere in the city— at the governor’s porch, in the marketplaces, by the buildings both civil and religious, right in the middle of what ought to be most revered.” Dio recognized the mechanics of blunt force, of slavery, behind the fl esh trade. Th e “Euboean Oration” reveals an T H E M O R A L I T I E S O F S E X I N T H E R O M A N E M P I R E  inchoate legislative impulse; Dio would have had the magistrate forbid prostitution, like a doctor tending to the “disease” infecting the civic body.

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

  But this seeker, Justin, was unconvinced until he found Christian philosophy. Following baptism, he became a Christian teacher and the fi rst of the apologists whose work survives. Justin studiously main- tained the persona and trappings of a phi los o pher. His two apologies and his Dialogue with Trypho are usually mined as evidence for the gradual ac- commodation of Christian theology with Platonic metaphysics. But they are at least as interesting as statements of a second- century sexual ideology that parted quite as much from Plato as from the regnant norms of imperial society. For Justin the conversion to Christianity meant leaving behind a life of entrenched sexual indulgence. “Th ose who once reveled in fornica- tions now cleave to chastity alone.” Th e sexual propriety of the Christians was one of the chief recommendations for the new religion, and it stood in sharp contrast to the patterns of sexual conduct not just allowed but insti- tutionalized in the ancient Mediterranean. “We see that nearly all of them are led into prostitution, not only the girls but also the males. In the way THE WILL AND THE WORLD  that those of old are said to have reared herds of sheep and cattle, goats and grazing horses, in these times children are reared, but for shameful use. So too an abundance of women, she- men, and ineff ably wicked ones are set up for this sort of pollution. And you receive income, revenue, and taxes from those whom you ought to cast out of your civilization.” Th e centrality of prostitution stood as a stain on the oikoumenē, the hard- won civilization of the Roman Empire.  Justin’s apology provides an important witness to Christian self- presentation in the middle of the second century. Th e Christians had cre- ated a way of life indiff erent to the lures of plea sure. “It is our principle ei- ther to marry for the purpose of rearing children or to abstain from marriage and live in complete continence.” Justin does not off er a strictly Pauline justifi cation for marriage as a safeguard against sexual pollution. Instead, marriage is justifi ed as a procreative project. In part Justin is appealing to the broadly accepted purpose of marriage in the ancient world. Marriage was understood, and structured, above all as a procreative relationship. Procreative intent distinguished marriage from all other relationships, and marriage contracts often included a purpose clause, procreandorum liber- orum causa. But Justin is the earliest witness to the co- optation of this ide- ology for specifi cally Christian ends. For the Greeks and Romans, the pro- creative purpose of marriage located the relationship in a network of legal exchanges and transfers; it was certainly not seen as a palliative for the otherwise dubious exercise of sexual faculties. Justin, like so many Chris- tians after him, turns the purpose of marriage into a mitigating factor, ex- cusing the sexual use of the body.

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

  Chrysostom speaks of same-sex eros as a pathology. “All passions are without honor, but especially the madness for males. The soul suffers more in the disgrace of these sins than the body does in disease.” The books of the philosophers are “full of this disease.” But tellingly, for Chrysostom, same-sex love is not only a disease whose origins lie in deviant desires of the soul. “Do not think, because you have heard him say ‘they burned,’ that this is a disease of desire only. In fact it comes more from their state of dissolution, which kindled their lust.” Chrysostom’s etiology of same-sex love, then, is complex. It does not rest purely on an improper kind of lust, nor an excessive amount of it, but a virulent synthesis of the two. He compares the man who enjoys same-sex love with a person who is titillated by smearing himself with sewage and running naked through the streets: strange desire and lack of control combine to produce the deviant. In Chrysostom’s harangues, there is no sense that sexual deviance is inborn, but it could certainly become physiologically embedded. If a virgin was sentenced to sexual debasement with animals, he said, but then came to enjoy it, she was lamentably in thrall to a “disease.” In other words, Chrysostom’s sexual pathology imagines an escalating feedback loop between act and desire, body and soul. “With this sin, the soul is ruined by the body. Whatever sin you might name, you can utter none equal to this in lawlessness. If those who suffer from it realized their sin, they would accept ten thousand deaths rather than suffer it.”18 Just as important as the incipient pathology of desire is the primary term that has, quietly, dropped out of the equation in the late antique sources: masculinity. Dio Chrysostom, for example, compared “androgyny” to a progressive disease that gradually wasted a man’s nature, leaving him effeminate in manner and sexual predilection. Pre-Christian concepts of erotic misuse were embedded in a well-established order of thought about manliness. Gender deviance and sexual deviance were an ideological pair, their causes and effects—and outward signs—deeply intermeshed. The Christian moralists have excised the concern with gender deviance to focus on sexual deviance. And their moral anxieties are inserted within a different scale of values, one more fundamentally concerned about sin and salvation than secular honor.19

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

  Of all the early Christians, Clement is most sensitively estranged from the civic fabric of the Roman Empire. This was a dizzying vantage from which to view the world. There is something of Dio Chrysostom’s alienated perspective in Clement’s lofty pronouncements. “Such complete lasciviousness has poured over the cities that it has become the law.” Like Dio, Clement located the essence of the ancient sexual economy in the institution of venal sex. “Women are prostituted in brothels, selling the violation of their flesh for pleasure, and boys are led to reject their nature, taking on the role of women.” Clement had the pulse of imperial sexual culture. No matter what any moralist said, “the whores are proof of what is actually done.” Indulgence was not a matter of abuse or excess; it was embedded in the order of society. “The wise men of the laws allow this. They let them sin with the protection of law. They call unspeakable acts of pleasure contentment.” In Alexandria Clement had a disturbing front-row seat to the most brutal machinery of the Roman sexual economy. He could watch the giant slave ships at dock, bringing “fornication like wine or grain,” selling girls wholesale to procurers throughout the empire. Sexual moralism inspires Clement’s discomfort, but he is one of the most striking observers of the realities of the Roman slave trade. The sale of sex was anything but marginal. “The whole earth is filled with fornication and disorder.” This was something Dio could never have said. Fornication was not just a word; it was a worldview, in which the cosmos, the order of civilized life, appeared to be in the grip of sin.55 Clement’s thought-world and modes of expression are still shaped by the vital civic backdrop and eclectic philosophical koinē of the high empire, but the logic of his sexual ideology is exclusively Christian—a highly rigid form of Christianity at that. Clement is not a voice of moderation. His attitudes toward sexuality are as rigorist, or more so, as much of what will become orthodoxy after him. Clement fended off encratism by strategically occupying as much of its ground—and appropriating as much of its language—as his interpretation of Paul would allow. Clement’s defense of marriage bears utterly no resemblance to the warm ideals of conjugal affection or cheery romantic patriotism of the culture that surrounded him. Clement’s sexual ethic is one of personal transformation and transcendence of desire, but it is still locked into the mold of an ancient way of life. For Clement, this transformation would be marked by a vastly new relationship between the Christian and the minutiae of ordinary social life. In short, the radical discovery of the desert, which would allow the transformational ethic to unfold against the open backdrop of empty space, had not yet happened.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It was already dark when he reached the city. He drove slowly through Times Square, fascinated by the night’s ugliness. He stopped for a red light and looked up at a movie marquee towering on the corner, its dead white face advertising The Spanking of Cindy. There was a short man in a black leather jacket standing by the box office, hunching his cadaverous shoulders in the wind. “Now there’s a queer,” thought Fred. “Wonder what he’s doing in front of that movie house?” He looked at the marquee again, and noticed that the billboard next to it was painted with a girl in jeans thrusting her bottom out, her blond hair swirling across her back, her mouth open in laughter. It was an ad for jeans, but it suited the movie; he vaguely wondered if it had been arranged that way. He turned his head to look at the other side of the street and saw a broken old woman lying unconscious in the middle of the sidewalk with her face against the concrete, her ragged dress spattered across her ugly thighs. He was disgusted to see a young man pissing against the wall not two feet away from her. People were stepping over her as if she were an object, vicious people, it seemed to him, swinging their arms and legs in every direction, working their mouths, yelling at each other, eating hot dogs or Italian ices. What would it be like to be among them? He watched a couple of hookers in miniskirts and leather boots kick their way through a pile of garbage, screaming with laughter. As soon as he got to a different neighborhood, he stopped at a Chinese flower store and bought Jane a single long-stemmed rose. “Just so you wouldn’t think I’d forgotten you,” he said when he handed it to her. “Thanks.” She laid it on the night table, between the bottle of baby oil and the flowered Kleenex box. “Were you sick?” “No. I just had some…things to do. Did you miss me?” “Yeah.” She began undoing her buttons. “Listen, Jane. Tomorrow night will be the last night I can see you for a while. I was thinking maybe we could do something special.” “Like what?” “Like you could call in sick and we could meet somewhere for dinner.” She put her hands in her lap and stared at him with something like alarm in her wide, smudged eyes. “We could have dinner, go to a movie or a concert—whatever you’d like. Then we could go to a hotel—or maybe your apartment—and spend the night together.” She looked at her nails and picked them. “Of course I realize that I can’t ask you to take a night off work without making it worth your while. You’d do all right.” “How much?” “Five hundred.” She didn’t say anything. “It could be very nice. We’d have time to really act like people in a relationship. What do you say?” “I don’t know.”

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

  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N libido” places the law in the avant- garde of Christian thought, where the notion of a specifi cally deviant form of desire remained inchoate. Most of all the law represents the fulfi llment of a Pauline view of same- sex love in Roman law (though there is not to be found in Justinian’s legislation any awareness of female homoeroticism as a problem capable of regulation). Now the gender of the partners was the primary determinant, capable of activating the punitive machinery of the Roman state. Th e traditional media of Roman regulation— property transfers, judicial access, public honor— have been fully displaced by a stark willingness to dictate sexual behavior as such. Th e strict criminalization of same- sex love strikes us as a momentous innovation. But Justinian’s regulatory ambitions outreached the technologies of surveillance, and very little in fact is heard of his blanket prohibitions on intercourse between males. Instead it was another aspect of Justinian’s sexual reforms that fl ared into a massive public operation. In the very fi rst years of his reign, Justinian enacted a law specifi cally aimed at pederasty. Details of the law, and its application, are preserved only by the historians, principally Procopius and John Malalas. Malalas relates that Justinian arrested two bishops accused of “living badly and bedding males.” He identifi es them by name, Isaiah of Rhodes and Alexander from Diospolis in Th race. Tried by the prefect of Constantinople, Isaiah was “gravely tortured” and sent into exile, while Alexander was relieved of his male organ and paraded through the streets of Constantinople. According to Malalas, their behavior incited Justinian to pass a law that “those discovered in pederasty were to have their penises amputated.” “At that time many men inclined toward males were rounded up and, after their members were cut off , died.” Procopius, whose Secret History is a salacious and highly skewed mem-oir of Justinian’s reign, describes the aff air with patent disgust, as an example of Justinian’s extremism. His account provides two details absent in Malalas— that the charges could be applied retroactively, and that even slaves could make an accusation— which we simply cannot check against other contemporary in for mants. Th ey are in the spirit of the mea sure. It is worth considering why Justinian’s crusade against pederasty has left traces in the historical record, whereas the criminalization of same- sex love enters the annals of jurisprudence with scarcely a whimper. In part the answer may lie in the continuing vitality of pederastic practices. In the fourth century, Libanius and John Chrysostom speak, with disgust, of pederasty C H U R C H , S O C I E T Y, A N D S E X I N T H E A G E O F T R I U M P H 

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

  In- dulgence was not a matter of abuse or excess; it was embedded in the order of society. “Th e wise men of the laws allow this. Th ey let them sin with the protection of law. Th ey call unspeakable acts of plea sure contentment.” In Alexandria Clement had a disturbing front- row seat to the most brutal ma- chinery of the Roman sexual economy. He could watch the giant slave ships at dock, bringing “fornication like wine or grain,” selling girls wholesale to procurers throughout the empire. Sexual moralism inspires Clement’s dis- comfort, but he is one of the most striking observers of the realities of the Roman slave trade. Th e sale of sex was anything but marginal. “Th e whole earth is fi lled with fornication and disorder.” Th is was something Dio could never have said. Fornication was not just a word; it was a worldview, in which the cosmos, the order of civilized life, appeared to be in the grip of sin.  Clement’s thought- world and modes of expression are still shaped by the vital civic backdrop and eclectic philosophical koinē of the high empire, but the logic of his sexual ideology is exclusively Christian— a highly rigid form of Christianity at that. Clement is not a voice of moderation. His attitudes toward sexuality are as rigorist, or more so, as much of what will become orthodoxy after him. Clement fended off encratism by strategically occupy- ing as much of its ground— and appropriating as much of its language— as his interpretation of Paul would allow. Clement’s defense of marriage bears utterly no resemblance to the warm ideals of conjugal aff ection or cheery romantic patriotism of the culture that surrounded him. Clement’s sexual  FROM SHAME TO SIN ethic is one of personal transformation and transcendence of desire, but it is still locked into the mold of an ancient way of life. For Clement, this trans- formation would be marked by a vastly new relationship between the Christian and the minutiae of ordinary social life. In short, the radical dis- covery of the desert, which would allow the transformational ethic to un- fold against the open backdrop of empty space, had not yet happened. Clement’s sexual ideology was in many ways idiosyncratic, most of all in his belief that physical desire could be graciously metamorphosed into a rational will to participate in creation. Th e small but decisive diff erences between Clement and his greatest student, Origen, are highly telling. Ori- gen is almost totally unconcerned with procreation as a justifi cation for sex; he assumes that “holy procreation” is part of the married life, but it does not bear the same great moral weight that it does in Clement, as the prime justifi cation for the reproductive act. Even more than Clement, Origen was content to tread wherever his exegesis led him: Paul had allowed marriage and considered it a gift of God, and that was that.

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

  Clement’s Christians fi nd their will to transcend the lures of desire and plea sure threatened in every direction. His writings are an unmatched guide to the mundane dangers of modest wealth in a house hold of the Roman Empire. He is the fi rst Christian to worry about the temptation that slaves, specifi cally eunuchs, posed to the women of a house hold. He is distressed by the built environment of the ancient city, aghast at a culture in which erotic art was a normal accoutrement of the domestic sphere. Clement’s believers faced constant visual bombardment. Th ey were surrounded by the vibrant erotic anarchy of ancient Alexandria. Clement was, like so many of his contemporaries, acutely sensitive to the ocular experience of living in a great Roman town. For him the words of Christ not to look with lust posed an overwhelming challenge. “He pulls up desire from its root.” Inviting looks were “nothing other than adultery with the eyes, desire cast from afar through them. For the eyes are corrupted before the rest of the body.” In his belief that vision was a sort of particulate intromission, it has been noted, Clement is not at all far from Achilles Tatius, who described  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N the erotic gaze as “fondling from afar.” What for Achilles was one of the harmless thrills of life was for Clement an environmental hazard, clogging the air with pollutants that threatened the purity of the body. Clement’s attitude toward same- sex love is a predictable extension of his commitment to Pauline authority and his strict procreationism. Following Philo, Clement believed that the Mosaic prohibition on the consumption of hare, that “lewd beast,” was really a ban on pederasty. Clement also believed that Moses had condemned same- sex relations literally, for he repeatedly cited the triune ban on “fornication, adultery, and the corruption of children,” and, wrongly, attributed it to Moses. Th e injunction against peder- asty has even snuck into the Ten Commandments, between adultery and theft! For Clement, Paul’s condemnation of same- sex love in Romans was a straightforward continuation of the Mosaic law. Clement elaborates on the idea of “natural use” with unsparing literalism. Every orifi ce, every canal, every protuberance had a natural use, to which it was limited. Procreationism and the naturalization of heterosexuality went hand in hand. Th

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  She has the loose, jaunty swing and perch of the double-barreled sex, all her movements radiating from the groin, always in equilibrium, always ready to flow, to wind and twist and clutch, the eyes going tic-toe, the toes twitching and twinkling, the flesh rippling like a lake furrowed by a breeze. This is the incarnation of the hallucination of sex, the sea nymph squirming in the maniac’s arms. I watch the two of them as they move spasmodically inch by inch around the floor; they move like an octopus working up a rut. Between the dangling tentacles the music shimmers and flashes, now breaks in a cascade of sperm and rose water, forms again into an oily spout, a column standing erect without feet, collapses again like chalk, leaving the upper part of the leg phosphorescent, a zebra standing in a pool of golden marshmallow, one leg striped, the other molten. A golden marshmallow octopus with rubber hinges and molten hoofs, its sex undone and twisted into a knot. On the sea floor the oysters are doing the St. Vitus dance, some with lockjaw, some with double-jointed knees. The music is sprinkled with rat poison, with the rattlesnake’s venom, with the fetid breath of the gardenia, the spittle of the sacred yak, the bolloxed sweat of the muskrat, the leper’s sugar-coated nostalgia. The music is a diarrhea, a lake of gasoline, stagnant with cockroaches and stale horse piss. The drooling notes are the foam and dribble of the epileptic, the night sweat of the fornicating nigger frigged by the Jew. All America is in the trombone’s smear, that frazzled brokendown whinny of the gangrened sea cows stationed off Point Loma, Pawtucket, Cape Hatteras, Labrador, Canarsie and intermediate points. The octopus is dancing like a rubber dick—the rhumba of Spuyten Duyvil inédit . Laura the nympho is doing the rhumba, her sex exfoliated and twisted like a cow’s tail. In the belly of the trombone lies the American soul farting its contented heart out. Nothing goes to waste—not the least spit of a fart. In the golden marshmallow dream of happiness, in the dance of the sodden piss and gasoline, the great soul of the American continent gallops like an octopus, all the sails unfurled, the hatches down, the engine whirring like a dynamo. The great dynamic soul caught in the click of the camera’s eye, in the heat of rut, bloodless as a fish, slippery as mucus, the soul of the people miscegenating on the sea floor, popeyed with longing, harrowed with lust. The dance of Saturday night, of cantaloupes rotting in the garbage pail, of fresh green snot and slimy unguents for the tender parts. The dance of the slot machine and the monsters who invent them. The dance of the gat and the slugs who use them. The dance of the blackjack and the pricks who batter brains to a polypous pulp.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  There are frames all over the place now, lined up in front of the blue room for their enemas. It is the Six o’Clock Special. There are maybe twenty guys waiting by now. It looks like a long train, a long assembly line of broken, twisted bodies waiting for deliverance. It is very depressing, all these bodies, half of them asleep, tied down to their frames with their rear ends sticking out. All these bodies bloated, waiting to be released. Every third day I go for my enema and wait with the long line of men shoved against the green hospital wall. I watch the dead bodies being pushed into the enema room, then finally myself. It is a small blue room and they cram us into it like sardines. Tommy runs back and forth placing the bedpans under our rear ends, laughing and joking, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “Okay, okay, let’s go!” he shouts. There is a big can of soapy water above each man’s head and a tube that comes down from it. Tommy is jumping all around and whistling like a little kid, running to each body, sticking the rubber tubes up into them. He is jangling the pans, undoing little clips on the rubber tubes and filling the bellies up with soapy water. Everyone is trying to sleep, refusing to admit that this whole thing is happening to them. A couple of the bodies in the frames have small radios close to their ears. Tommy keeps running from one frame to the other, changing the rubber gloves on his hands and squirting the tube of lubricant onto his fingers, ramming his hands up into the rear ends, checking each of the bodies out, undoing the little clips. The aide keeps grabbing the bedpans and emptying all the shit into the garbage cans, occasionally missing and splattering the stuff on the floor. She places the empty pans in a machine and closes it up. There is a steam sound and the machine opens with all the bedpans as clean as new. Oh God, what is happening to me? What is going on here? I want to get out of this place! All these broken men are very depressing, all these bodies so emaciated and twisted in these bedsheets. This is a nightmare. This isn’t like the poster down by the post office where the guy stood with the shiny shoes; this is a concentration camp. It is like the pictures of all the Jews that I have seen. This is as horrible as that. I want to scream. I want to yell and tell them that I want out of this. All of this, all these people, this place, these sounds, I want out of this forever. I am only twenty-one and there is still so much ahead of me, there is so much ahead of me. I am wiped clean and pushed past the garbage cans. The stench is terrible.

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

  so vast from the aims of Roman policy, and derives from a juridical regime so alien from the techniques of Roman jurisprudence, that the Christian author of this tract has made the best of a very bad job. He must have sensed it. For this unfl appable compiler appended a recent enactment of the emperor Th eodosius I, the only contemporary inclusion in his handbook, a decree that, in his judgment, “followed the spirit of the Mosaic Law to the fullest.” In 390, Th eodosius had issued a law declaring, “We cannot allow the city of Rome, the mother of all virtues, any longer to be polluted by the contaminating emasculation of men’s sexual honor, and the rude vigor handed down from the ancient found ers to be depleted by a people weakened in softness, becoming an insult to ages past and present.”  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N Th e law explicitly punished men who suff ered their bodies to be used like the fl esh of women, but the focus of imperial energy was specifi c and revealing. “Having dragged out all— it is embarrassing to say— from the male brothels, let the fl ames of vengeance expiate their crime with the populace watching, so everyone will know that the soul of a man is to be treated by all as an inviolable precinct.” Such fl orid eff usions are characteristic of late imperial statecraft. But the public incineration of the male prostitutes of Rome is almost totally unaccountable in terms of ordinary Roman policy. Opinion has been divided about the judgment of the author who included a copy of this law in his comparison of Mosaic and Roman jurisprudence. Was the spirit of the Th eodosian constitution, indeed, akin to reli- gious injunctions against same- sex love, or was the compiler overreaching in his eff ort to bend the law into a point of contact between the “spirit of Moses” and the Roman state? In other words, was the Th eodosian mea sure inspired by religious homophobia, or by the immemorial ideals of Roman manhood? On the one hand, the attack came at a moment pregnant with change, as Th eodosius I was transforming the Roman state into a Christian one, and the offi cial confl agration of a whole class of sexual outcasts was uncharacteristic of Roman jurisprudence. On the other hand, the language of the law could not possibly be more emphatic about its roots in Roman tradition, and it would be a dodge to explain this rhetoric as a cloak for a clandestine Christian agenda. Th e offi cial who actually drafted the language of the law was, in fact, one of the most visible pagans around the court. But most tellingly, the object of regulation was sexual passivity, and in the form of public prostitution. Th e categories of regulation are fundamentally, unde-niably Roman. Th e chemistry of the Th

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

  “to slavery or to the brothel,” fates that were not distinct. One of the more interesting, if oblique, indices of the role of slavery in the sex industry is that Roman law developed a special covenant allowing masters to sell slaves with the binding restriction that the slave not be prostituted; whether these covenants indicate residual benevolence or the frequency of biological relations between master and slave, they demonstrate the real danger that, for a slave, prostitution lurked in the future. Th e desire to romanticize venal sex was perduring, and even the erotic art in brothels idealized the sexual encounter between professional and customer. But the critics object. Th e lingering stench, the atmosphere of violence, the cramped concrete cribs, the systemic abuse: these were the reality of the fl esh trade. Disease and chemical dependence surely followed in the wake of such exploitative drudgery. Th e low price of sex is stunning. Sex seems to have cost maybe two asses in an ordinary town, “about the price of a loaf of bread.” Fellatio cost less. Th e vile rate of the transaction is also a harrowing indication of the crushing amount of work women had to perform to survive and to profi t their own ers. Th e commodifi cation of sex was carried out with all the ruthless effi ciency of an industrial operation, the unfree body bearing the pressures of insatiable market demand. In the brothel the prostitute’s body became, little by little, “like a corpse.” Th e lower- class atmosphere of the brothel lies behind one of the more subtle but important changes in the moral economy of prostitution under the Roman Empire. To the respectable classes, prostitution was not immoral— it was squalid. Th e wealthy had slaves to serve their needs, and it was unnecessary to share sexual receptacles. Prostitution was the poor man’s piece of the slave system. In his City of God, Augustine imagined the simple desires of the ordinary man; after military victory for the Roman army and economic prosperity, he would think, “let public prostitutes abound for any who want to use them, but especially for those who cannot aff ord private ones!” Th e brothel was even patronized by slaves. It raised the disturbing specter of sharing women with men of the lowest ranks. Th e brothel was irredeemably vulgar, and in a carefully and formally stratifi ed society, nothing was more damning.  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  We used to compare notes sometimes sitting in the chop suey joint around the corner from the office. It was a strange atmosphere. Maybe it was because there was no wine. Maybe it was the funny little black mushrooms they served us. Anyway it wasn’t difficult to get started on the subject. By the time Steve met us he would already have had his workout, a shower and a rubdown. He was clean inside and out. Almost a perfect specimen of a man. Not very bright, to be sure, but a good egg, a companion. Hymie, on the other hand, was like a toad. He seemed to come to the table direct from the swamps where he had passed a mucky day. Filth rolled off his lips like honey. In fact, you couldn’t call it filth, in his case, because there wasn’t any other ingredient with which you might compare it. It was all one fluid, a slimy, sticky substance made entirely of sex. When he looked at his food he saw it as potential sperm; if the weather were warm he would say it was good for the balls; if he took a trolley ride he knew in advance that the rhythmic movement of the trolley would stimulate his appetite, would give him a slow, “personal” hard on, as he put it. Why “personal” I never found out, but that was his expression. He liked to go out with us because we were always reasonably sure of picking up something decent. Left to himself he didn’t always fare so well. With us he got a change of meat—Gentile cunt, as he put it. He liked Gentile cunt. Smelled sweeter, he said. Laughed easier too. . . . Sometimes in the very midst of things. The one thing he couldn’t tolerate was dark meat. It amazed and disgusted him to see me traveling around with Valeska. Once he asked me if she didn’t smell kind of extra strong like. I told him I liked it that way—strong and smelly, with lots of gravy around it. He almost blushed at that. Amazing how delicate he could be about some things. Food for example. Very finicky about his food. Perhaps a racial trait. Immaculate about his person, too. Couldn’t stand the sight of a spot on his clean cuffs. Constantly brushing himself off, constantly taking his pocket mirror out to see if there was any food between his teeth. If he found a crumb he would hide his face behind the napkin and extract it with his pearlhandled toothpick. The ovaries of course he couldn’t see. Nor could he smell them either, because his wife too was an immaculate bitch. Douching herself all day long in preparation for the evening nuptials. It was tragic, the importance she gave to her ovaries. Up until the day she was taken to the hospital she was a regular fucking block. The thought of never being able to fuck again frightened the wits out of her.

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

  the phi los o phers are “full of this disease.” But tellingly, for Chrysostom, same- sex love is not only a disease whose origins lie in deviant desires of the soul. “Do not think, because you have heard him say ‘they burned,’ that this is a disease of desire only. In fact it comes more from their state of dissolution, which kindled their lust.” Chrysostom’s etiology of same- sex love, then, is complex. It does not rest purely on an improper kind of lust, nor an excessive amount of it, but a virulent synthesis of the two. He compares the man who enjoys same- sex love with a person who is titillated by smearing himself with sewage and running naked through the streets: strange desire and lack of control combine to produce the deviant. In Chrysostom’s ha-rangues, there is no sense that sexual deviance is inborn, but it could certainly become physiologically embedded. If a virgin was sentenced to sexual debasement with animals, he said, but then came to enjoy it, she was lam-entably in thrall to a “disease.” In other words, Chrysostom’s sexual pathology imagines an escalating feedback loop between act and desire, body and soul. “With this sin, the soul is ruined by the body. What ever sin you might name, you can utter none equal to this in lawlessness. If those who suff er from it realized their sin, they would accept ten thousand deaths rather than suff er it.” Just as important as the incipient pathology of desire is the primary term that has, quietly, dropped out of the equation in the late antique sources: masculinity. Dio Chrysostom, for example, compared “androgyny” to a progressive disease that gradually wasted a man’s nature, leaving him ef-feminate in manner and sexual predilection. Pre- Christian concepts of erotic misuse were embedded in a well- established order of thought about manliness. Gender deviance and sexual deviance were an ideological pair, their causes and eff ects— and outward signs— deeply intermeshed. Th e Christian moralists have excised the concern with gender deviance to focus on sexual deviance. And their moral anxieties are inserted within a diff erent  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N scale of values, one more fundamentally concerned about sin and salvation than secular honor. It is unsurprising, then, that Christian hostility toward love between males could not be easily reconciled with an ancient regulatory system or-ga nized around masculinity. In classical Roman law, there were two points of intersection between public regulation and same- sex eros. First, the man who violated a freeborn boy was guilty of stuprum— criminal violation.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  On the corner was Paul Sauer’s place where raw hides and trimmed hides were stacked up in the street; they stank frightfully too. And then the acrid odor coming from the tin factory behind the house—like the smell of modern progress. The smell of a dead horse, which is almost unbearable, is still a thousand times better than the smell of burning chemicals. And the sight of a dead horse with a bullet hole in the temple, his head lying in a pool of blood and his asshole bursting with the last spasmic evacuation, is still a better sight than that of a group of men in blue aprons coming out of the arched doorway of the tin factory with a hand truck loaded with bales of fresh-made tin. Fortunately for us there was a bakery opposite the tin factory and from the back door of the bakery, which was only a grill, we could watch the bakers at work and get the sweet, irresistible odor of bread and cake. And if, as I say, the gas mains were being laid there was another strange medley of smells—the smell of earth just turned up, of rotted iron pipes, of sewer gas, and of the onion sandwiches which the Italian laborers ate whilst reclining against the mounds of upturned earth. There were other smells too, of course, but less striking; such, for instance, as the smell of Silverstein’s tailor shop where there was always a great deal of pressing going on. This was a hot, fetid stench which can be best apprehended by imagining that Silverstein, who was a lean, smelly Jew himself, was cleaning out the farts which his customers had left behind in their pants. Next door was the candy and stationery shop owned by two daffy old maids who were religious; here there was the almost sickeningly sweet smell of taffy, of Spanish peanuts, of jujubes and Sen-Sen and of Sweet Caporal cigarettes. The stationery store was like a beautiful cave, always cool, always full of intriguing objects; where the soda fountain was, which gave off another distinct odor, ran a thick marble slab which turned sour in the summertime and yet mingled pleasantly, the sourness, with the slightly ticklish, dry smell of the carbonated water when it was fizzed into the glass of ice cream. With the refinements that come with maturity the smells faded out, to be replaced by only one other distinctly memorable, distinctly pleasurable smell—the odor of the cunt. More particularly the odor that lingers on the fingers after playing with a woman, for, if it has not been noticed before, this smell is even more enjoyable, perhaps because it already carries with it the perfume of the past tense, than the odor of the cunt itself. But this odor, which belongs to maturity, is but a faint odor compared with the odors attaching to childhood. It is an odor which evaporates, almost as quickly in the mind’s imagination, as in reality.

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

  Tried by the prefect of Constantinople, Isaiah was “gravely tor- tured” and sent into exile, while Alexander was relieved of his male organ and paraded through the streets of Constantinople. According to Malalas, their behavior incited Justinian to pass a law that “those discovered in ped- erasty were to have their penises amputated.” “At that time many men in- clined toward males were rounded up and, after their members were cut off , died.” Procopius, whose Secret History is a salacious and highly skewed mem- oir of Justinian’s reign, describes the aff air with patent disgust, as an ex- ample of Justinian’s extremism. His account provides two details absent in Malalas— that the charges could be applied retroactively, and that even slaves could make an accusation— which we simply cannot check against other contemporary in for mants. Th ey are in the spirit of the mea sure.  It is worth considering why Justinian’s crusade against pederasty has left traces in the historical record, whereas the criminalization of same- sex love enters the annals of jurisprudence with scarcely a whimper. In part the an- swer may lie in the continuing vitality of pederastic practices. In the fourth century, Libanius and John Chrysostom speak, with disgust, of pederasty CHURCH, SOCIETY, AND SEX IN THE AGE OF TRIUMPH  as a lively contemporary institution. But they are perhaps the last observers to do so, and it is hard to imagine that pederasty— for so long legally con- fi ned to the bodies of slaves, now relentlessly attacked by ecclesiastical hectoring— had much of its old public ac cep tance, much less open advo- cacy, by the time of Justinian. But in a world that expected sexual attrac- tion toward smooth bodies, that sequestered its women, and that nourished institutions like the schools and monasteries where male companionship was fostered, it was not an unlikely occurrence. Th e intense violence of Jus- tinian’s campaign refl ects both the importance of pederasty as a social practice and its fl agrant off ensiveness to a Christian emperor, for whom it was an insuff erable blazon of errant, bygone cultures. Th e spectacular mu- tilation mandated by the law presages the more lurid strains of the Byzan- tine penal code, and it testifi es to the belief that terror could go where sur- veillance might not. According to Malalas, the strategy worked. “And a great fear followed among those diseased with lust for males.”  Th e violent repression of same- sex love dates to the ambitious early years of Justinian’s reign.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I had met the whole flock of them little by little, including Sister Antolina who wore a truss and who apparently was the high priestess of the cult of onanism. They had all had a crush on Sister Antolina at one time or another. And Arline with the chocolate eclair mug wasn’t the first of the little group to go to the insane ayslum. I don’t say it was masturbation that drove them there but certainly the atmosphere of the convent had something to do with it. They were all spoiled in the egg. Before the afternoon was over my old friend MacGregor walked in. He arrived looking glum as usual and complaining about the advent of old age, though he was hardly past thirty. When I told him about Arline he seemed to liven up a bit. He said he always knew there was something wrong with her. Why? Because when he tried to force her one night she began to weep hysterically. It wasn’t the weeping as much as what she said. She said she had sinned against the Holy Ghost and for that she would have to lead a life of continence. Recalling the incident he began to laugh in his mirthless way. “I said to her—well you don’t need to do it if you don’t want . . . just hold it in your hand. Jesus, when I said that I thought she’d go clean off her nut. She said I was trying to soil her innocence—that’s the way she put it. And at the same time she took it in her hand and she squeezed it so hard I damned near fainted. Weeping all the while, too. And still harping on the Holy Ghost and her ‘innocence,’ I remembered what you told me once and so I gave her a sound slap in the jaw. It worked like magic. She quieted down after a bit, enough to let me slip it in, and then the real fun commenced. Listen, did you ever fuck a crazy woman? It’s something to experience. From the instant I got it in she started talking a blue streak. I can’t describe it to you exactly, but it was almost as though she didn’t know I was fucking her. Listen, I don’t know whether you’ve ever had a woman eat an apple while you were doing it . . . well, you can imagine how that affects you. This one was a thousand times worse. It got on my nerves so that I began to think I was a little queer myself. . . . And now here’s something you’ll hardly believe, but I’m telling you the truth. You know what she did when we got through? She put her arms around me and she thanked me. . . . Wait, that isn’t all. Then she got out of bed and she knelt down and offered up a prayer for my soul. Jesus, I remember that so well.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  He grazes quietly amidst the décor; when the time comes he will travel down again. He keeps his muzzle to the ground, grubbing for the sparse nourishment which the mountain peaks afford. In this strange Capricornian condition of embryosis God the he-goat ruminates in stolid bliss among the mountain peaks. The high altitudes nourish the germ of separation which will one day estrange him completely from the soul of man, which will make him a desolate, rocklike father dwelling forever apart in a void which is unthinkable. But first come the morganatic diseases, of which we must now speak. . . . There is a condition of misery which is irremediable—because its origin is lost in obscurity. Bloomingdale’s, for example, can bring about this condition. All department stores are symbols of sickness and emptiness, but Bloomingdale’s is my special sickness, my incurable obscure malady. In the chaos of Bloomingdale’s there is an order, but this order is absolutely crazy to me: it is the order which I would find on the head of a pin if I were to put it under the microscope. It is the order of an accidental series of accidents accidentally conceived. This order has, above all, an odor—and it is the odor of Bloomingdale’s which strikes terror into my heart. In Bloomingdale’s I fall apart completely: I dribble onto the floor, a helpless mess of guts and bones and cartilage. There is the smell, not of decomposition, but of misalliance. Man, the miserable alchemist, has welded together, in a million forms and shapes, substances and essences which have nothing in common. Because in his mind there is a tumor which is eating him away insatiably; he has left the little canoe which was taking him blissfully down the river in order to construct a bigger, safer boat in which there may be room for everyone. His labors take him so far afield that he has lost all remembrance of why he left the little canoe. The ark is so full of bric-à-brac that it has become a stationary building above a subway in which the smell of linoleum prevails and predominates. Gather together all the significance hidden away in the interstitial miscellany of Bloomingdale’s and put it on the head of a pin and you will have left a universe in which the grand constellations move without the slightest danger of collision. It is this microscopic chaos which brings on my morganatic ailments. In the street I began to stab horses at random, or I lift a skirt here and there looking for a letter box, or I put a postage stamp across a mouth, an eye, a vagina. Or I suddenly decide to climb a tall building, like a fly, and once having reached the roof I do fly with real wings and I fly and fly and fly, covering towns like Weehawken, Hoboken, Hackensack, Canarsie, Bergen Beach in the twinkling of an eye.

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

  The focal point of this chapter is the orthodox model of sexuality presented by the remarkable figure Clement of Alexandria. Clement was a slightly later contemporary of Achilles Tatius, and a fellow citizen of Alexandria. It is important to imagine the two inhabiting the same culture and the same cityscape. Clement is the first Christian whose sexual doctrines are known in depth. Nearly every interpretive problem in the study of early Christian sexual morality comes to a head in the question of how to situate Clement within the trajectory of the church’s sexual mission. Was he an isolated voice for the “silent majority” of married Christians or a characteristic representative of an ever more powerful ecclesiastical establishment? Is he a spokesman of moderation or an impertinent meddler in erotic affairs? To Clement the society surrounding him was corrupted, root and branch: “the whole world is full of fornication and disorder.” To understand how Clement came to this judgment, we must discover precisely how the doctrines embodied in the authoritative traditions of early Christianity intersected mainstream sexual expectations. The model of normative sexual behavior that developed principally out of Paul’s reactions to the erotic culture surrounding him received fuller expression in the second and third centuries as a distinct alternative to the social order of the Roman Empire. Clement, writing just before more radical experiments in asceticism would begin to capture the Christian imagination, presents a sort of asceticism within the order of marriage and within the order of the ancient city. Ultimately Clement’s principal achievement was exegetical; he was able to weave into a whole the disparate strands of authoritative tradition and give clear expression to the meaning of Christian norms in the midst of a world alienated from God.7