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 Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  something is happening now, something is going wrong over there. The nurse is shouting for the machine, and the corpsman is crawling on the black man’s chest, he has his knees on his chest and he’s pounding it with his fists again and again. “His heart has stopped!” screams the nurse. Pounding, pounding, he’s pounding his fist into his chest. “Get the machine!” screams the corpsman. The nurse is pulling the machine across the hangar floor as quickly as she can now. They are trying to put curtains around the whole thing, but the curtains keep slipping and falling down. Everyone, all the wounded who can still see and think, now watch what is happening to the pilot, and it is happening right next to me. The doctor hands the corpsman a syringe, they are laughing as the corpsman drives the syringe into the pilot’s chest like a knife. They are talking about the Green Bay Packers and the corpsman is driving his fist into the black man’s chest again and again until the black pilot’s body begins to bloat up, until it doesn’t look like a body at all anymore. His face is all puffy like a balloon and saliva rolls slowly from the sides of his mouth. He keeps staring at the ceiling and saying nothing. “The machine! The machine!” screams the doctor, now climbing on top of the bed, taking the corpsman’s place. “Turn on the machine!” screams the doctor. He grabs a long suction cup that is attached to the machine and places it carefully against the black man’s chest. The black man’s body jumps up from the bed almost arcing into the air from each bolt of electricity, jolting and arcing, bloating up more and more. “I’ll bet on the Packers,” says the corpsman. “Green Bay doesn’t have a chance,” the doctor says, laughing. The nurse is smiling now, making fun of both the doctor and the corpsman. “I don’t understand football,” she says. They are pulling the sheet over the head of the black man and strapping him onto the gurney. He is taken out of the ward. The Korean civilian is still screaming and there is a baby now at the end of the ward. The nurse says it has been napalmed by our own jets. I cannot see the baby but it screams all the time like the Korean and the young man without any legs I had met in the ambulance. I can hear a radio. It is the Armed Forces radio. The corpsman is telling the baby to shut the hell up and there is a young kid with half his head blown away. They have brought him in and put him where the black pilot has just died, right

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

  Virginity was a blaring advertisement for the religion. Th e virgin’s body was a merit of the Christian community, which marked out Christian propriety from Roman debauchery.  It would be hard to overestimate the extent to which Christian sexual moralizing, in its fi rst three centuries, was shaped by the boundary between the righ teousness of the Christian community and the seething depravity of the vast outside world. Classical paganism’s enduring reputation for sex- ual de cadence has its origins in the biting critique of Christian apologetic literature (with imperial biography supplying ample help). It has seemed easy enough to dismiss Christian accounts of Greco- Roman sexual practice as so much predictable exaggeration in the arms race of sexual invective. In need of shock value, amid a culture desensitized to any but the most un- likely confi gurations of venereal plea sure, the imagination was free to con- trive extravagant forms of sexual villainy. Certainly Tertullian’s countersuit against the Romans qualifi es as immoderate. Th e Christian advocate al- leges pervasive sexual irregularity: “With so many acts of adultery, so many THE WILL AND THE WORLD  shameful violations, so many vessels exposed to public lust both in stalls and in the street, how much mixing of blood, how much commingling within the clan, and thus how much general inducement to incest?” Pro- miscuity was, he noted, the inexhaustible raw material of low pop u lar en- tertainments such as mime and comedy. But for Tertullian the decisive evi- dence for Roman lechery was not to be found in the appetite for vulgar theater. More concretely, it was witnessed in the public courts, including a recent tragedy that was no fi ction of the stage but “an aff air judged while Fuscianus was prefect of the city.” Th e shock value of Tertullian’s case against the Romans derives, quite intentionally, from an awful precision of time, place, and circumstance.  Some years before the prefecture of Fuscianus, which can be dated to AD 187– 189, a Roman boy of respectable birth had escaped the clutches of the small staff of attendants who actually did much of what we would con- sider parenting. He was, like so many others, pulled into the slave trade that lurked in even the most civilized corners of the Roman Empire. After some time he reappeared in Rome, in a slave market. Unwittingly, his own father bought him and “used him in the Greek fashion.” Soon enough the slave was sent to perform chained labor in the fi elds. Th ere he encountered his old pedagogue and nurse, and a sequence of disastrous recognitions ensued.

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

  The backsliding believer in love with his stepmother was symptomatic of deeper and more complex antagonisms at Corinth. Paul was faced with an intellectually armored libertine wing within the incipient church. Some of the Corinthians were claiming that the emancipatory message of the gospel freed the body from petty moral demands: “All things are lawful for me.” Paul’s response was both sharp and ranging. The body, he insisted, was not made for fornication. The believer’s body was a “member of Christ,” and the member of Christ could not be made “a member of a prostitute.” Paul’s libertine interlocutors espoused a traditional upper-class attitude toward the male body, whose desires were to be balanced by vigilant control but not self-denial. Paul’s response betrays an acute sensitivity to bodily purity. The sexual machinery of the body was something to be protected from contamination, not simply kept in proper balance. Coition was anything but a vacuous physical act without effects beyond the circulation of heat and moisture. “He who joins himself to a prostitute becomes one body with her.” Paul’s demand was simple: “flee fornication.” The stakes were pitched deliberately high, and in an idiom of Mediterranean piety that gentile converts would immediately understand. “The fornicator sins into his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?” Fornication was an act of pollution in the sacred space of the Christian body.18 Paul’s reflections on fornication, like a stone on the river bottom that suddenly catches the light, reveals the unexpected depths of the term’s meaning. Fornication was not just a marker of ethnic differentiation, providing a template of sexual rules setting God’s faithful apart from the heathens. Paul’s understanding of fornication made the body into a consecrated space, a point of mediation between the individual and the divine. When Paul heightened the term’s meaning, he also foreshadowed a certain narrowing of the term porneia and its scope in gentile Christianity. The specter of sexual lassitude presented by the libertine faction immediately suggested not the establishment of a free love commune but the traditionally harmless and “lawful” outlet for male sexual energies: prostitution. The availability of dishonored women traced the profoundly different foundations of sexual morality in the outside world. It was almost inevitable that fornication would come to identify, ever more narrowly, the types of extramarital sexual license entrenched in gentile society, centered on bodies without access to sexual honor. In First Corinthians, Paul has set his sights not on heavy petting gone too far among young innocents in the congregation, nor on carnal bohemianism. Far more consequentially, Paul intended to dam the traditional canals long approved as spillways for the inevitable sexual heats of young men in the ancient world. Christian porneia would recast the harmless sexual novitiate that was an unobjectionable part of sexual life in antiquity as an unambiguous sin, a transgression against the will of God, echoing in eternity.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The boy was older than any of us and he was a sissy, a fairy in the making. His very walk used to enrage us. As soon as he was spotted the news went out in every direction and before he had reached the corner he was surrounded by a gang of boys all much smaller than himself who taunted him and mimicked him until he burst into tears. Then we would pounce on him, like a pack of wolves, pull him to the ground and tear the clothes off his back. It was a disgraceful performance but it made us feel good. Nobody knew yet what a fairy was, but whatever it was we were against it. In the same way we were against the Chinamen. There was one Chinaman, from the laundry up the street, who used to pass frequently and, like the sissy from Father Carroll’s church, he too had to run the gantlet. He looked exactly like the picture of a coolie which one sees in the schoolbooks. He wore a sort of black alpaca coat with braided button holes, slippers without heels, and a pigtail. Usually he walked with his hands in his sleeves. It was his walk which I remember best, a sort of sly, mincing, feminine walk which was utterly foreign and menacing to us. We were in mortal dread of him and we hated him because he was absolutely indifferent to our gibes. We thought he was too ignorant to notice our insults. Then one day when we entered the laundry he gave us a little surprise. First he handed us the package of laundry; then he reached down below the counter and gathered a handful of lichee nuts from the big bag. He was smiling as he came from behind the counter to open the door. He was still smiling as he caught hold of Alfie Betcha and pulled his ears; he caught hold of each of us in turn and pulled our ears, still smiling. Then he made a ferocious grimace and, swift as a cat, he ran behind the counter and picked up a long, ugly-looking knife which he brandished at us. We fell over ourselves getting out of the place. When we got to the corner and looked around we saw him standing in the doorway with an iron in his hand looking very calm and peaceful. After this incident nobody would go to the laundry any more; we had to pay little Louis Pirossa a nickel each week to collect the laundry for us. Louis’s father owned the fruit stand on the corner. He used to hand us the rotten bananas as a token of his affection. Stanley was especially fond of the rotten bananas as his aunt used to fry them for him. The fried bananas were considered a delicacy in Stanley’s home. Once, on his birthday, there was a party given for Stanley and the whole neighborhood was invited.

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

  When Justinian went to ex- amine the world of prostitution in sixth- century Constantinople, he found the ancient slave trade in every regard, except the state’s approval. Pimps were using classic means of obtaining slaves: defrauding the young and kid- napping them. Th e young age of the girls brought into prostitution is sug- gestive of the sheer violence of the system. Kept in squalid brothels, given none of the profi ts and only enough to survive, the young women were vic- tims of the sort of forcible prostitution that had been illegal for a century.  Th e law of Justinian showed par tic u lar dis plea sure for the fact that many pimps papered their activities with the trappings of legality. Pimps used written agreements with the prostitutes and “even sought securities for some of the women.” Justinian recognized that the contracts between pimps and prostitutes were intrinsically coercive and little more than an eff ort to lend a modicum of legality and legitimacy to their practice: it is even possible that pimps extracted consent waivers in response to the legislation of Th eo- dosius II and Leo that forbade coercive pimping and then pimping altogether. Justinian’s remedy was the most sweeping action yet undertaken by the Roman state. Th e law prohibited anyone from “leading women into perver- sion by guile, deceit, or coercion.” Justinian decreed even further that “there will henceforth be no allowance given to pimping, keeping women in broth- els, off ering women for public perversion, or traffi cking such women by any other means.” Th e emperor came down hard on the sex trade. He was spe- cifi c and exhaustive. Whereas the law of Leo had, in terse language, enjoined “let no one be a pimp,” Justinian’s law forbade pimping, brothel- keeping, prostituting, or any other means of acting as a vendor of sex.  For both Th eodosius II and Justinian, the two great Christian codifi ers of the law, prostitution was a par tic u lar fi xation. Under Justinian, prostitution  FROM SHAME TO SIN was the target of a policy even wider than his campaign against sexual pro- curement. Justinian and Th eodora founded a convent for reformed prosti- tutes. Th is refuge was to be a means of escape for women trapped in the life of the brothel. Named “Repentance,” the convent advertised the possibility of inner change for the prostitute and established a reformatory on Chris- tian terms.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  IT IS WISE TO REMEMBER THAT, when we are reading letters never intended for us, any problems of understanding are ours and not theirs. Sometimes, however, another person’s mail is still clear to us even across two thousand years. Here is a letter discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt and dated to “[Year] 29 of Caesar [Augustus], Payni 23,” that is, for us, June 18 of 1 BCE: Hilarion to his sister Alis many greetings, likewise to my lady Berous and to Apollonarion. Know that we are even yet in Alexandria. Do not worry if they all come back (except me) and I remain in Alexandria. I urge and entreat you, be concerned about the child and if I should receive my wages soon, I will send them up to you. If by chance you bear a child, if it is a boy, let him be, if it is a girl, cast her out. You have said to Aphrodisias, “Do not forget me.” How can I forget you? Therefore I urge you not to worry. (POxy 4.744) Hilarion and others left their native Oxyrhynchus to work in Epypt’s capital city of Alexandria. But, once there, Hilarion failed to write home. So his worried wife, Alis—who in Egyptian custom was also his sister—sent him a message with somebody called Aphrodisias. This is his reply from Alexandria. At the start of his letter he greets Alis, their mother Berous, and their son Apollonarion. We can also see quite clearly the terrible difference in this father’s attitude toward having a son and having a daughter. A daughter is to be “cast out”—left either on temple steps, and destined for slavery, or on the garbage dump, and destined for death. For a fuller understanding of that single letter today we would need: first, to study the letter itself; next, to place it within the life of that family; and, finally, to locate it in the wider cultural and social matrix of its contemporary Egypt. But even as we work through those interwoven layers of context, we are always trying to do just one thing: to turn letter into story. That original story was well known to all those originally mentioned in the letter, but—for us—a translation is necessary not only from Greek to English, but from letter to story. And that translation is developed by asking the letter questions, questions, and more questions. Recall, therefore, that, as we said in Chapter 1, when we read Paul, we are reading somebody else’s mail. The only way to understand a Pauline letter is to turn it into a Pauline story by working our way through the Pauline matrix of a single letter within all of his other letters within Diaspora Judaism within the Roman Empire.

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

  It is utterly unattested before its appearance amid the literary debris of the primitive church. Th e word seems to be a deliberate transfi guration of pederasty, replacing eros, erotic love, with phthoria, violation, and thereby construing all sexual contact with the young as an act of corruption. Th e Christians reduced to a one- word slogan the more artful denunciations of Philo, but the sensibility was identical, as was the sense of where contemporary sexual culture strayed most egregiously from the divine will.  As with porneia, the very novelty of Christian language mirrored the transformative logic of a distinctive sexual morality. Th e fact that the early C h r i s t i a n s were forc e d to c oi n t wo ter m s —arsenokoitia and paidophthoria— merely to speak about same- sex eros is not a sign of cautious precision or hesitant refl ection on the exact nature of sexual sin. Rather, it refl ects the absence of an equivalent category in Greco- Roman culture and the grasp- ing attempt to fi nd a language adequate to the moral disapprobation con- veyed by the early Christian authors. Th eir attitude is most evident in the eternal torments imagined for same- sex lovers in the early apocalyptic lit- THE WILL AND THE WORLD  erature, especially the Apocalypse of Peter. Considered authentic by many in the early church, the Apocalypse of Peter envisions a curious hell where sinners are punished according to their crime. Men who “pollute their own bodies, conducting themselves like women” and women who “copulate with each other as a man with a woman” were cast off a cliff , only to reas- cend it in an eternal cycle of punishment. In treating male and female ho- moeroticism as a singular transgression, the Apocalypse belongs to that handful of imperial- period testimonies that refl ect the fi rst stirrings of a concept with a long future, a sort of “unnatural” sexuality based strictly on gender preference. Th e grid of sexual confi gurations underlying the Apoca- lypse is not structurally dissimilar from the scientia sexualis we encounter in contemporary astrological and medical texts. But in the Christian scales of value, the licitness of penetration depends on the gender of the receptive fl esh. And instead of being relegated to a life on the margins of society, the sexual deviant in the Christian imagination would be relegated to an eter- nity of sensational torment.  It scarcely needs saying that the early Christians inhabited a world vastly unlike our own.

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

  Th e words sat at the intersection of high theological debate and mun- dane social fact. It is remarkable that on April 21, just eleven days after the enthronement of Nestorius, the chancery of the emperor, Th eodosius II, issued one of the most remarkable, and misunderstood, laws of the later Roman Empire. Th e law was suggested by Florentius, a man of Syrian origin who was then praetorian prefect of the east. Th e law declared: “We cannot  FROM SHAME TO SIN suff er for pimps, fathers, and slave- owners who impose the necessity of sin- ning on their daughters or slave women to enjoy the right of power over them nor to indulge freely in such crime. Th us it pleases us that these men are subjected to such disdain that they may not be able to benefi t from the right of power nor may anything be thus acquired by them. It is to be granted to the slaves and daughters and others who have hired themselves out on account of their poverty (whose humble lot has damned them), should they so will, to be relieved of every necessity of this misery by ap- pealing to the succor of bishops, judges, or even defensors. So that, if the pimps shall think these women are to be urged on or impose the necessity of sin on those who are unwilling, they will lose not only that power which they held, but they will be proscribed by exile to the public mines, which is less of a punishment than that of a woman who is seized by a pimp and compelled to endure the fi lth of an intercourse that she did not will.”  Rarely is the translation of Christian ideology into statutory law quite so clear. Th e “necessity of sinning” was precisely the language of Basil and Cyril, Augustine and Julian, and the formulation undoubtedly refl ects the impact of Christianity on the imperial chancery. Th e law of 428 was a path- breaking act of social policy. It addressed sin as a social problem. Th e state took an active concern in the spiritual welfare of women forced into prosti- tution. Th e constitution of Th eodosius II made a statement that the govern- ment was willing to interfere with the private powers of masters and fathers. It also off ered aid to poor women who had been forced into prostitution by circumstance rather than private legal power. But there were limits to the new policy. Th e mea sure did not punish women who prostituted themselves, nor men who patronized the brothel. Prostitution remained legal.

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

  later law was also more robust. All pimps in Constantinople were fl ogged and exiled. What had begun as a crusade against coercive pimping was simplifi ed into a prohibition of pimping altogether. Above all the law of 439 is a strong indication that pimping was inherently, incurably coercive. As enacted, the mea sure was valid in Constantinople. Th e reign of Leo saw this policy extended beyond Constantinople. In an edict issued to the people, Leo decreed that “no one may hereafter act as a pimp, nor shall revenue be brought into the accounts from this source.” Th e law thus established on an empire- wide basis the ban on pimping that Th eodosius II had enacted for the capital city. Leo’s law clearly proscribed pimping, not prostitution. And he banned the collection of taxes throughout the provinces from this source, pimps, not from prostitution in general. In one regard he showed a new level of precision: women could not be prostituted, even if they were actresses. Stage per for mance had an association with venal sex, and actresses were exempt from the penalties of stuprum. Acting troupes numbered prostitutes, slave and free, among their company. It is not hard to imagine that, in the wake of Th eodosius II’s ban on pimping, stage com- panies continued to run prostitution rings. Leo’s law redressed that possibility and highlighted the state’s eagerness to combat sexual procurement in any form. Only in AD 498, in the reign of Anastasius, with the abolition of the commercial tax altogether, did the Roman state completely extract itself from the sordid revenues of the sex trade. Th e emperor was specially lauded for this moral dimension, at best secondary, of his fi scal policy. Th ese changes lie in the background of the eff orts of Justinian to address prostitution as a public policy concern. Early in his reign, Justinian char-tered an investigation into the status quo of prostitution in Constantinople. Th e results of his commission were recorded in the preamble to a new law. Justinian announced that the “name and deeds of pimps were detestable to the ancient laws and emperors.” He claimed that he had already passed legislation to increase the penalties against pimps, and he tried to maintain a vigilant policy against them. His investigation, which resulted in the legislation of 535, uncovered a seething underworld of violent and fraudulent procurement. In sixth- century Constantinople, where all prostitution was nominally in de pen dent, voluntary, and untaxed, the old system of coercive prostitution was thriving. 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  Th

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  I was still in this phase when my father stuck the newspaper under my nose and said, “Did you see what your old boss is doing?” There was a small article on the upcoming mayoral elections in Westland. He was running for mayor. I took the paper from my father’s offering hands. For the first time, I felt an uncomplicated disgust for the lawyer. Westland was nothing but malls and doughnut stands and a big ugly theater with an artificial volcano in the front of it. What kind of idiot would want to be mayor of Westland? Again, I left the room. I got the phone call the next week. It was a man’s voice, a soft, probing, condoling voice. “Miss Roe?” he said. “I hope you’ll forgive this unexpected call. I’m Mark Charming of Detroit Magazine.” I didn’t say anything. The voice continued more uncertainly. “Are you free to talk, Miss Roe?” There was no one in the kitchen, and my mother was running the vacuum in the next room. “Talk about what?” I said. “Your previous employer.” The voice became slightly harsh as he said these words, and then hurriedly rushed back to condolence. “Please don’t be startled or upset. I know this could be a disturbing phone call for you, and it must certainly seem intrusive.” He paused so I could laugh or something. I didn’t, and his voice became more cautious. “The thing is, we’re doing a story on your ex-employer in the context of his running for mayor. To put it mildly, we think he has no business running for public office. We think he would be very bad for the whole Detroit area. He has an awful reputation, Miss Roe—which may not surprise you.” There was another careful pause that I did not fill. “Miss Roe, are you still with me?” “Yes.” “What all this is leading up to is that we have reason to believe that you could reveal information about your ex-employer that would be damaging to him. This information would never be connected to your name. We would use a pseudonym. Your privacy would be protected completely.” The vacuum cleaner shut off, and silence encircled me. My throat constricted. “Do you want time to think about it, Miss Roe?” “I can’t talk now,” I said, and hung up. I couldn’t go through the living room without my mother asking me who had been on the phone, so I went downstairs to the basement. I sat on the mildewed couch and curled up, unmindful of centipedes. I rested my chin on my knee and stared at the boxes of my father’s old paperbacks and the jumble of plastic Barbie-doll cases full of Barbie equipment that Donna and I used to play with on the front porch. A stiff white foot and calf stuck out of a sky-blue case, helpless and pitifully rigid.

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

  energies. In his early tract On Order, Augustine provided the most lucid statement of prostitution’s necessity that has survived from antiquity. “What could claim to be more fi lthy and more worthless, more full of shame and defi lement, than prostitutes and pimps and other infections of this kind? But take whores out of human aff airs, and you will overturn everything because of lusts. Put them in the place of matrons, and you will ruin honor with fallenness and disgrace.” Augustine was no stranger to the world of procured sex, though he was more familiar with the sophisticated side of the fl esh trade. He spent over a de cade with one concubine, and when forced to dismiss her, by his engagement to a ten- year- old girl of the Roman gentry, he quickly “procured another” companion in the interim. So he had a robust appreciation for the forces that prostitution held in check. If prostitutes were to be removed from society, not just the honor of free women, “everything” would be thrown into confusion. Prostitution for Augustine was a necessary evil. Th e social order had to make such compromises, to allow virtue to fl ourish. “[Pimps and prostitutes] represent the most impure part of mankind by their habits and the most vile condition in the laws of order. Are there not in the bodies of living things certain parts that, if you tried to consider only these, you couldn’t stand it? Nevertheless, the order of nature did not wish for things that are necessary to be lacking, but neither did it allow them, as they are dishonorable, to be conspicuous. Still, these imperfections, by holding their place, concede the better part to their superiors.” Matrons enjoyed their place in society because prostitutes defl ected dangerous lusts away from honorable women. An unfortunate passage, with a long future, it was no more than the meeting point of Augustinian pessimism and perfectly traditional ideology. If prostitution was an obstacle to Christianization, marriage was an opportunity for reformist ambitions. Chrysostom’s sermons reveal an ecclesiastical ambition to control the rituals of marriage as a means of gaining control over the meaning of marriage. It is telling that, across late antiquity, the ancient deductio in domum, a festive march from the bride’s house to the groom’s, remained the ordinary marriage ritual. Th e endurance of joyous, erotically charged wedding ceremonies testifi es to the survival, beneath the spread of religious solemnity, of a sexual sensibility that is probably closer to Achilles Tatius than anything contrived by a Christian bishop. Nothing nettled Chrysostom so much as the “diabolical pomp,” which, he argued 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  in vain, “dishonored” the marriage. Th e “whorish songs,” the “shameful

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

  Th e invisibility of the kinaidos in Paul points to a primary dependence on the moral armory of Hellenistic Judaism. Once again, comparison with Paul’s near contemporary, Philo, off ers in- structive parallels. It is revealing that, in the voluminous remnants of Philo, the kinaidos is equally missing. Philo’s attitudes toward same- sex love do not pose any mystery. Philo abhorred any manifestation of homoerotic de- sire or practice, though his loathing was pulled mainly toward the institution of pederasty. Th e ubiquity of Plato’s writings in the mental world of Philo evoked the energetic critique of pederasty in the writings of the Alexandrian  FROM SHAME TO SIN Jew. But the attack on pederasty was not an attempt to slay some imaginary monster from the past and purge the Platonic kingdom of an unwanted intruder. For Philo, pederasty was a characteristic affl iction of the society that surrounded him. It had become “something boasted of, and not just by those who indulge in it, but also those who suff er it.” It was a damnable act, for both parties to the transaction. Th e deviance of pederasty, at its core, lay in the attraction of males for males. Philo contrasted the madness of men for women and women for men, “in which case the desires themselves are pursued according to the laws of nature,” with the madness of men for other males “who diff er only in age.” Th e pederast sought a “plea sure” that was itself “against nature.”  Far more than Paul, Philo makes strategic use of the models of mascu- linity in the culture around him to bolster his own attack on same- sex erotics. Amorous encounters with free boys drew his special indignation. Philo ar- gued that the victim of pederasty was constitutionally transformed by the experience of sexual passivity. Th e receptive role literally damped the circu- lation of warmth through the developing male body and turned it toward physical femininity. “Becoming accustomed to suff er the affl iction of women, they waste in body and soul, so that not one ember of their manly nature is left fl ickering with heat.” Similar conceptions may well have un- derlain Greco- Roman opposition to pederasty with free boys, though Philo has given fullest voice to the fear. Pederasty, he argued, might so disrupt the buildup of proper heat that turned a boy into a man that an irreversible cycle of tabescence would set in, rendering the boy cold, frail, moist: an ef- feminate. Manliness was such a fragile, indeterminate thing that it might be lost altogether. Th e eromenos might become an androgyne, a she- male, a physiological monster.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  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.” “What are your reservations?” “I don’t think people in these circumstances can act like people having a relationship.” “Well, maybe you’re right about that. But still it might be fun. I’d love to talk to you about a movie we’d seen or…” “I think you’d be surprised if you found out what I’m like outside of here.” “I can’t believe I wouldn’t like you.” “You’d think I was weird.” “I’m not as closed-minded as you think.” “It’s just that we might not have anything to talk about.” She didn’t notice the animal smell. — He waited for half an hour at their appointed meeting place. He wasn’t surprised when she stood him up. He was somewhat surprised when he called the escort service to make an appointment and they told him she’d quit.

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

  Counseling others had helped her turn past childhood abuse into something positive. But it was now time to investigate her Jehovah’s Witness experience. Using the Internet, she found a wealth of information about the Witnesses and cults in general, and the methods used to unduly influence members. When she finally proved to herself that Jehovah’s Witnesses were a cult, it pinpointed many cult-induced phobias and fears that had lingered with her for years. She has since come to learn about the detrimental effects of the Governing Body’s policies on child-rearing. This includes corporal punishment of children. Most repulsive is their organizational failure to call police when children were being raped by pedophiles in the organization. A number of high profile lawsuits have recently been brought against the Watchtower and several perpetrators. We can only imagine how many more victims will be coming forward. Lloyd Evans and Jehovah’s Witnesses When I first met him, Lloyd was blogging on the Internet under the name John Cedars, as he was buying time to develop an exit strategy from the Watch Tower Society. He has a huge online following and is responsible for helping thousands of people reassess their obedience to this aberrant Christian group.120 Their Governing Body’s policy against blood transfusions, established in 1945, is a non-Biblical and erroneous interpretation of passages of the Bible that has led to countless deaths and needless suffering.121 For all the victims of Watchtower ideology, Armageddon is a real event that could strike at any moment. It is a time when divine forces will be unleashed to kill pretty much everyone who isn’t a Jehovah’s Witness, and the idea that Armageddon is “just around the corner” has been instilled in Witnesses of all ages for decades. The level of phobia indoctrination of this group, bolstered by their numerous false prophecies over the decades, restricts members from higher education, sports, voting, Christmas and birthday celebrations, and promotes total dependency. Lloyd Evans got his first taste of this when he was a child. As part of his family-worship evening, his parents orchestrated a fake phone call, reporting to Lloyd and his sister that the Great Tribulation (the prelude to Armageddon) had started. Lloyd ran upstairs to pack his vital belongings, because the family had to flee with other Witnesses to escape the authorities under Satan’s control. Only when panic-stricken Lloyd came back downstairs could he tell from the smiles on his parents’ faces that this had been some sort of macabre joke. By the time Lloyd was 20, he had started to see glitches in this high-control pseudo-religious group. But this formative awakening was put on hold when Lloyd’s mother died of cancer in 2001, when he was 21. When Lloyd was 25, he fulfilled one of his mother’s dying wishes, by attending a two-month course designed to train young Witness men to better serve the organization. Within three years of graduating, he was promoted to the position of elder in his local congregation.

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

  more consequentially as a “plague harsher than all other plagues.” Th e pagan Libanius, too, spoke of “love for males” as a disease, so the purchase of this idea extended beyond Christian circles in late antiquity. Christian voices uttered not only the diagnosis but also, more grimly, the need for a drastic cure. “Th ose who do these things are worthy of death, and not only those who do them, but also those who consent. For assent is participation. . . . Th erefore Moses recalled the wicked deeds of Sodom and Gomorrah, and did not leave their end in silence, but to create fear of this thing to be avoided. Th us, this vice, this contamination of a life without decency is not allowed by one whose soul is thinking of God. Th ere are those, to be sure, who believe that they are not guilty if they do not perform such deeds, even while they assent to their per for mance. But to remain quiet or to take amusement at the report of such things, when they should be condemned, amounts to assenting to them.” Th ese are the words of a Christian theologian, writing in Rome, in the years just before the constitution of Th eodosius I. Th e linguistic overlap was not circumstantial. Only a few years after the law of Th eodosius, in Rufi - nus’s translation of Origen’s commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the question is posed whether more glory was accrued by those who had abstained from same- sex intercourse under the explicit command of the Mosaic Law or those who had abstained “from this contagion by the judgment of their own mind, not even letting their thoughts approach it. Would you not much prefer the one who, not because held back by the intervention of a law, still kept himself pure from the contamination of such fl agitious deeds?” Only a little later still, Augustine could describe same- sex love as “against nature” and “without doubt more fl agitious and disgraceful” than even sinful heterosexual conjunctions. Th e linguistic similarities are not just striking incidences of a shared, fi nite vocabulary. Th ey represent a phase of mental rapprochement between traditional and Christian modes of prejudice, one in which Christian authors gravitated toward a traditional vocabulary, even as they infused it with a new spirit. Th e law of 390 was generated out of the same unstable mixture. Th e Christianization of public sexual morality produced new and often unpredictable harmonies, but there is no mistaking the fact that the shrillest notes came from the ecclesiastical side of the choir. Between the Th eodosian crusade against male prostitution and the reign of Justinian, there are no imperial mea sures bearing on same- sex erotics.

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

  The contrasts with the law of 390 are telling. The measure of Theodosius I ordering the incineration of the male prostitutes in Rome also deployed a vocabulary of Roman manhood that would have been not unfamiliar to Cicero. And though the measure of Theodosius was aimed against male prostitutes and thus might seem more narrowly constructed, there is good reason to regard it as a more portentous enactment. The immolation of male prostitutes was not a vice-squad operation. As Firmicus shows, there was a tendency to assimilate open sexual passivity, infamia, and prostitution. Similarly, John Chrysostom slips inadvertently between discussion of same-sex eros and same-sex prostitution. The mental association was imponderably ancient. The incineration of male prostitutes was a malevolent and symbolic act, which might be seen as something like a proxy measure against male passivity altogether, conducted within the technological means of the Roman state.29 With Theodosius I’s enactment, a state that had refrained from “witch hunts” was now explicitly trying to eradicate the “contamination” of sexual passivity. The sense of sexual deviance as a disease threatening to infect the body politic is subtly but ominously new in the legislative domain. This sensibility rests on the assumption, not indigenous to Roman legal tradition, that the people itself risked pollution by irregular sexual practices. The law is emphatic on this point. The drafter enunciates a concern that the plebs will become weakened if defiled. The holocaust was meant to be executed “with the populus watching.” This language reflects a new style of social solidarity in late antiquity, in which the sexual behavior of “the people” might be the object of imperial concern. In earlier phases of Roman history, enormous social prejudice in combination with rigid stratification of rank and citizenship allowed the state to stare past the inconsequential lives beneath its field of vision. Christianity carried with it a sense of “the people” not only as a civic category but as the human collective itself. This solidarity, in the field of sexual regulation, had unintended and at times violent consequences.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  If you were shy of soiling your hands they would explain to you very gently and intelligently just how these delicate mechanisms operated, what they did when they exploded, and why you must not waste even your garbage because . . . et ipso facto e pluribus unum . The thing that impressed me, going the rounds in search of work, was not so much that they made me vomit every day (assuming I had been lucky enough to put something into my guts), but that they always demanded to know if you were of good habits, if you were steady, if you were sober, if you were industrious, if you had ever worked before and if not why not. Even the garbage, which I had gotten the job of collecting for the municipality, was precious to them, the killers. Standing knee deep in the muck, the lowest of the low, a coolie, an outcast, still I was part of the death racket. I tried reading the Inferno at night, but it was in English and English is no language for a Catholic work. “Whatever enters in itself into its selfhood, viz., into its own lubet. . . .” Lubet! If I had had a word like that to conjure with then, how peacefully I might have gone about my garbage collecting! How sweet, in the night, when Dante is out of reach and the hands smell of muck and slime, to take unto oneself this word which in the Dutch means “lust” and in Latin “lubitum” or the divine beneplacitum . Standing knee deep in the garbage I said one day what Meister Eckhart is reported to have said long ago: “I truly have need of God, but God has need of me too.” There was a job waiting for me in the slaughterhouse, a nice little job of sorting entrails, but I couldn’t raise the fare to get to Chicago. I remained in Brooklyn, in my own palace of entrails, and turned round and round on the plinth of the labyrinth. I remained at home seeking the “germinal vesicle,” “the dragon castle on the floor of the sea,” “the Heavenly Heart,” “the field of the square inch,” “the house of the square foot,” “the dark pass,” “the space of former Heaven.” I remained locked in, a prisoner of Forculus, god of the door, of Cardea, god of the hinge, and of Limentius, god of the threshold. I spoke only with their sisters, the three goddesses called Fear, Pallor and Fever. I saw no “Asian luxury,” as had St. Augustine, or as he imagined he had.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  We promise you the highest wages, the most sanitary and hygienic conditions. The work is so easy that even a child could do it.” And if you had a sister, a wife, a mother, an aunt, as long as she could manipulate her hands, as long as she could prove that she had no bad habits, you were invited to bring her or them along to the ammunition works. If you were shy of soiling your hands they would explain to you very gently and intelligently just how these delicate mechanisms operated, what they did when they exploded, and why you must not waste even your garbage because . . . et ipso facto e pluribus unum. The thing that impressed me, going the rounds in search of work, was not so much that they made me vomit every day (assuming I had been lucky enough to put something into my guts), but that they always demanded to know if you were of good habits, if you were steady, if you were sober, if you were industrious, if you had ever worked before and if not why not. Even the garbage, which I had gotten the job of collecting for the municipality, was precious to them, the killers. Standing knee deep in the muck, the lowest of the low, a coolie, an outcast, still I was part of the death racket. I tried reading the Inferno at night, but it was in English and English is no language for a Catholic work. “Whatever enters in itself into its selfhood, viz., into its own lubet. . . .” Lubet! If I had had a word like that to conjure with then, how peacefully I might have gone about my garbage collecting! How sweet, in the night, when Dante is out of reach and the hands smell of muck and slime, to take unto oneself this word which in the Dutch means “lust” and in Latin “lubitum” or the divine beneplacitum. Standing knee deep in the garbage I said one day what Meister Eckhart is reported to have said long ago: “I truly have need of God, but God has need of me too.” There was a job waiting for me in the slaughterhouse, a nice little job of sorting entrails, but I couldn’t raise the fare to get to Chicago. I remained in Brooklyn, in my own palace of entrails, and turned round and round on the plinth of the labyrinth. I remained at home seeking the “germinal vesicle,” “the dragon castle on the floor of the sea,” “the Heavenly Heart,” “the field of the square inch,” “the house of the square foot,” “the dark pass,” “the space of former Heaven.” I remained locked in, a prisoner of Forculus, god of the door, of Cardea, god of the hinge, and of Limentius, god of the threshold.

• 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)

  In Chrysostom we see how the logic of excess begins to give way to a sense that this excessive desire was, in its very essence, strange.  Chrysostom speaks of same- sex eros as a pathology. “All passions are without honor, but especially the madness for males. Th e soul suff ers more in the disgrace of these sins than the body does in disease.” Th e books of 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 dis- solution, 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 cer- tainly 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 pathol- ogy 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.