Embarrassment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 69 of 79 · 20 per page

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  One burst behind the curtain like a storm, got out of her dress there, took possession of the first thing that came to hand—a silk dressing-gown covered with huge bouquets—and managed to pick up two cases of perfume besides. Exactly a minute later a pistol shot rang out, the mirrors disappeared, the display windows and stools dropped away, the carpet melted into air, as did the curtain. Last to disappear was the high mountain of old dresses and shoes, and the stage was again severe, empty and bare. And it was here that a new character mixed into the affair. A pleasant, sonorous, and very insistent baritone came from box no. 2: ‘All the same it is desirable, citizen artiste, that you expose the technique of your tricks to the spectators without delay, especially the trick with the paper money. It is also desirable that the master of ceremonies return to the stage. The spectators are concerned about his fate.’ The baritone belonged to none other than that evening’s guest of honour, Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov, chairman of the Acoustics Commission of the Moscow theatres. Arkady Apollonovich was in his box with two ladies: the older one dressed expensively and fashionably, the other one, young and pretty, dressed in a simpler way. The first, as was soon discovered during the drawing up of the report, was Arkady Apollonovich’s wife, and the second was his distant relation, a promising débutante, who had come from Saratov and was living in the apartment of Arkady Apollonovich and his wife. ‘Pardone!’ Fagott replied. ‘I’m sorry, there’s nothing here to expose, it’s all clear.’ ‘No, excuse me! The exposure is absolutely necessary. Without it your brilliant numbers will leave a painful impression. The mass of spectators demands an explanation.’ ‘The mass of spectators,’ the impudent clown interrupted Sempleyarov, ‘doesn’t seem to be saying anything. But, in consideration of your most esteemed desire, Arkady Apollonovich, so be it—I will perform an exposure. But, to that end, will you allow me one more tiny number?’ ‘Why not?’ Arkady Apollonovich replied patronizingly. ‘But there must be an exposure.’ ‘Very well, very well, sir. And so, allow me to ask, where were you last evening, Arkady Apollonovich?’ At this inappropriate and perhaps even boorish question, Arkady Apollonovich’s countenance changed, and changed quite drastically. ‘Last evening Arkady Apollonovich was at a meeting of the Acoustics Commission,’ Arkady Apollonovich’s wife declared very haughtily, ‘but I don’t understand what that has got to do with magic.’ ‘Ouee, madame!’

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  further in Chapter 2). Centuries after its composition, anxious rabbis (the religious ‘teachers’ of Judaism after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE ) banned public liturgical recitation of parts of Ezekiel. [14] Later Christians have faced the same embarrassment. In the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, the Church of England had the same instinct as Rabbi Eliezer in making very sparing use of Ezekiel in detailed regulations for public reading of the whole Bible over a year of its daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. In the various versions of the Church’s Book of Common Prayer between 1549 and 1604, the compilers made no bones about the parts of scripture that are ‘least edifying, and might best be spared, and therefore are left unread’. The Prayer Book’s revisers in 1662 felt that this instruction was a little too honest about the limitations of Holy Scripture, and replaced Archbishop Cranmer’s forthright Tudor phrase with the more discreet thought that the ‘most part’ of the Old Testament ‘will be read every year once’. [15] We must also be alert for modes of translation that do not reflect the concerns of the original but, instead, some contemporary preoccupation of our own, or of some previous generation. An innovation with serious consequences occurred in translations of the Bible in the mid-twentieth century which first introduced the anachronistic word ‘homosexual’ into biblical moral denunciations, not just in English but in other languages. Some translations continue to sport this distortion of the text, though others have retreated from it, such as the anglophone Revised Standard Version widely esteemed by scholars. Significantly, ‘heterosexual’ has rarely, if ever, made a similar linguistic appearance in modern Bible versions. [16] * The biblical texts, Judaistic or Christian, also share a further filter on the worlds that they portray: an overwhelmingly male gaze. Whatever the realities of the society which created them, the writing was done by men. No whole book of the Bible claims authorship by a woman, although two books of the Hebrew Scripture (Ruth and Esther) are named from women. Suggestions have been made about some books or sections of text in the Hebrew Scripture which lack an authorial attribution, particularly convincingly about the very ancient Song of Deborah (Judg. 5.1–31), but we are at an early stage in investigating such possibilities. [17] The one other likely major exception is the book now called the Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon: this is a late work in the Hebrew Bible’s evolution and highly unlikely to have any real connection with King Solomon. 1. Contrasting rubrics (instructions) for the lectionary (daily cycle of Bible readings) in the Book of Common Prayer, altered between the original 1549 version and the Prayer Book’s recasting in 1662. The rabbis debated whether the Song was one of the books that ‘defile the hands’ in ritual contact, which probably meant the opposite to what we might assume about the defiling character of its erotic content. All the scrolls of the Hebrew Scripture ritually defile the hands, needing ritual attention. So to affirm the defilement was an affirmation of the Song’s sacred character, stilling worries that it is among the very few biblical books that nowhere employs the Divine Name YHWH (Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes and perhaps Esther being the others). The Song of Songs is unlikely to be a single work but gathers together love-poems or songs in which around two-thirds of the texts are presented as the voices of women, very active in their pursuit and enjoyment of

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Leo VI (reigned 886–912) laid down that, for free citizens (slaves hardly mattered), the only form of union recognized would be one blessed by a priest – anything else would be ‘illegitimate concubinage’. [29] Leo’s Novella decided the shape of marriage in the Orthodox world thereafter; from the tenth century, Orthodoxy finally developed its own wedding ritual to the full. One awkward consequence that the Church of the Mediterranean had up to now avoided was that Orthodox clergy became responsible for all marriages within their jurisdiction. The untidiness of marriage in human society, perhaps tolerable in the ‘creation ordinance’ face of marriage, was hardly the model for the believer’s eternal relationship with Christ, as set out by Paul of Tarsus and the writer to the Ephesians. Previously any discrepancy, such as divorce or remarriage, could simply be left outside the bounds of the Church in the hands of civil law. The fact that this was no longer the case was embarrassingly demonstrated by Emperor Leo VI himself when, in 906, he compelled the Church authorities to recognize his fourth marriage, way beyond anything that the Church authorities ought to have considered theologically acceptable, following the principles of Basil the Great (Chapter 9). It took the Emperor’s forceful replacement of Patriarch Nicholas Mystikos by a marginally more compliant Patriarch to bring the Church reluctantly to heel. [30] The Novella of Leo VI appeared two centuries after the Dyophysite Patriarch George had launched his bid for monopoly of marriages among his own flock at the Synod of Dayrin. Why now? Imperial politics was one factor. An earlier sensational crisis over an imperial marriage in 796 had centred on the Emperor Constantine VI’s ruthless insistence on gaining the blessing of the Church for his own eccentric marital arrangements, after he had divorced his wife and married a lady of the Court, thereby jeopardizing the imperial succession. The Patriarch Tarasios’s inept though understandable lenience in imposing a light penance led to a crisis in the Church, and eventually to a political coup in which Constantine’s own mother, Irene, removed the Emperor from power by having him blinded. This messy affair was certainly an incentive for clarity in marital legislation. The very determination of Constantine VI to get ecclesiastical approval was witness to the fact that, by the late eighth century, the Byzantine elite were coming to expect the security provided by the Church blessing marriages. [31] Yet to sum up a complicated story, it was the tenth century before this became the norm in the Byzantine East, much later in northern Orthodoxy, and, as we will see, in the West no earlier than the twelfth century (below, Chapter 12). ICONS AND THE ‘ TRIUMPH OF

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Philosophes were as embarrassed as their Reformation precursors by the acceptance of such activity by admired Classical authors, and their suggestions for modifying existing treatment of same-sex activity usually extended no further than reducing it from a criminal

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  agent in the Incarnation; which of the human senses did it involve? The discussion of orifices did not involve the vagina. An early suggestion from the (possibly second century) Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah identified the eyes and therefore sight: Mary was disturbed by seeing a small child and immediately conceived. [17] An anonymous Egyptian author (long confused with another writer, Demetrios of Antioch) suggested the nose, with Mary savouring the sweet smell of the angel Gabriel; others advocated the mouth, with analogous connotations of taste. Probably the most popular option was the ear, since in Luke’s story of the angelic ‘Annunciation’, Mary learned of her conception through a conversation with Gabriel. This was a suggestion given authority from pioneering and influential Christmas sermons by Archbishop Proklos of Constantinople in the fifth century, and it had a long life in front of it, probably because the idea appeared more seemly than the alternatives, and was also easier to depict in art. None of the suggestions seem particularly edifying now. A society more attuned to modern genetics may ask, with equal clumsy literalness, how an incarnate Christ might be male, if his human chromosomes were entirely derived from Mary. [18] * After the Infancy Narratives, only Luke of all the Evangelists gives us any incident in Jesus’s youth before his public mission in his thirties (Luke 2.41–51); this is his visit to the Temple aged twelve, and there is no reason to treat it as any more historical than what goes before it. Later Christians, hungry to learn more about these missing years, created a great many more childhood stories, some of which are downright bizarre, extending as far as little Jesus repeatedly inflicting multiple mayhem on his playmates. Several of them met unusual ends, such as falling to their deaths when sliding down a sunbeam; they were only miraculously resuscitated after the Holy Child had been given a good telling-off by his mother, following complaints from the neighbours (see Plate 5). [19] Some of the reality is to be gleaned elsewhere in the Gospels, which make clear that Jesus had brothers and sisters. Once the Church began developing the idea of Mary as virgin, indeed as perpetual virgin, this scriptural testimony of a large family became an embarrassment. At the turn of the second and third centuries it was still not a problem for the North African theologian Tertullian, who looked at Matt. 13.55 and Mark 6.3 in matter-of-fact fashion to find four named brothers of Jesus (let alone at least a couple of unnamed sisters, whom he could also have encountered in some scribal versions of Mark 3.32).

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Freeland was a welfare state. If a citizen wanted anything from a load of bone meal to a sexual partner some department was ready to offer effective aid. The threat implicit in this enveloping benevolence stifled the concept of rebellion.... Carl walked through the Town Hall Square.... Nickel nudes sixty feet high with brass genitals soaped themselves under gleaming showers.... The Town Hall cupola, of glass brick and copper crashed into the sky. Carl stared back at a homosexual American tourist who dropped his eyes and fumbled with the light filters of his Leica.... Carl entered the steel enamel labyrinth of the Ministry, strode to the information desk... and presented his card. "Fifth floor... Room twenty-six..." In room twenty-six a nurse looked at him with cold undersea eyes. "Doctor Benway is expecting you," she said smiling. "Go right in." "As if he had nothing to do but wait for me," thought Carl... The office was completely silent, and filled with milky light. The doctor shook Carl's hand, keeping his eyes on the young man's chest.... "I've seen this man before," Carl thought.... "But where?" He sat down and crossed his legs. He glanced at an ashtray on the desk and lit a cigarette.... He turned to the doctor a steady inquiring gaze in which there was more than a touch of insolence. The doctor seemed embarrassed.... He fidgeted and coughed... and fumbled with papers.... "Hurumph," he said finally.... "Your name is Carl Peterson I believe...." His glasses slid down into his nose in parody of the academic manner.... Carl nodded silently.... The doctor did not look at him but seemed none the less to register the acknowledgment. ... He pushed his glasses back into place with one finger and opened a file on the white enameled desk. "Mmmmmmmm. Carl Peterson," he repeated the name caressingly, pursed his lips and nodded several times. He spoke again abruptly: "You know of course that we are trying. We are all trying. Sometimes of course we don't succeed." His voice trailed off thin and tenuous. He put a hand to his forehead. "To adjust the state -- simply a tool -- to the needs of each individual citizen." His voice boomed out so unexpectedly deep and loud that Carl started. "That is the only function of the state as we see it. Our knowledge... incomplete, of course," he made a slight gesture of depreciation.... "For example... for example... take the matter of uh sexual deviation ." The doctor rocked back and forth in his chair. His glasses slid down onto his nose. Carl felt suddenly uncomfortable.

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  “You mean as he was ogling my tits? You owe me a new shirt, by the way.” (She didn’t, really, but I figured I’d keep my options open. Never turn down the opportunity for new clothes.) “Destiny, it was priceless! Poor guy couldn’t figure out where to look. He was really embarrassed.” “He was embarrassed? It’s not like his ass was on display for the world to see.” She laughed again. “I don’t know about that. It’s one thing to be ogling seminaked strangers; it’s another to realize you were ogling your coworker and her girlfriend.” I gave up on the search for my shirt (a bra doesn’t show any more than a bikini top, right?) and started the car. Before we got very far, Elle was laughing again. “You should have seen his face, Des. His eyes were like dinner plates. I think he’d been watching awhile before he turned on the flashlight…and then saw the one person on the force who can consistently best him at target practice.” This time I managed to laugh as well. I hadn’t been so embarrassed since I was in junior high school and Julia Ruiz discovered I had pictures of actresses in my locker instead of boy-band members, but it was pretty damn funny. And as I was laughing, something dawned on me. The way I was squirming wasn’t just from embarrassment. Some little part of me was turned on, not so much by what actually happened as by images running through my head. I wasn’t quite sure how to broach the subject, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to say something. I finally choked out, “Too bad it was MacIntyre.” “If someone had to catch us, he’s perfect. He’s a good guy, and he’s so scared of doing anything to upset Debbie right now that he’ll keep it quiet.” “Yeah, but he’s still a guy. A man catching us is just embarrassing. A woman catching us and watching for a while—that might have been hot.” My voice kind of trailed off at the last bit. Elle made a funny choking noise. “What?” “I said it might have been hot.” I looked away, focusing completely on the road, not quite able to meet her eyes after that admission. “Hm. Sounds like somebody’s a bit of an exhibitionist…” I couldn’t tell from the tone of her voice whether that was a good thing or not. We hadn’t been together long enough for sharing our wilder fantasies to come easily. Had I found a limit? I figured the answer out pretty quickly, though, when I felt her hand brush my nipple. “So, my darling Destiny likes the idea of a stranger watching her getting off?” she said, still chuckling a bit, but in a throaty, sexy way now. I arched my back, pushing my breast toward her palm. “I guess so. Bit of a surprise for me, too,” I admitted.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The young French humanist Théodore de Bèze (Beza), future colleague and successor of John Calvin in Geneva, got his fingers burned by including among his elegant attempts at classical Latin verse a poem debating in Ovidian fashion the relative merits of his male and female lovers, and deciding in favour of the young man: later Catholic enemies did not let him forget this indiscretion. [96] From the fifteenth century, a better acquaintance with classical texts had brought to the West a rediscovery of most of the works of Plato, which, among other homoerotic revelations, disconcertingly revealed the same-sex relations of Socrates with some of his students, previously censored from the available literature. Since Socrates was so widely praised in early Christian Greek writings, with his execution seen as a prefiguring of Christian martyrdom, this was an embarrassment. Not, however, for one Sienese humanist, Antonio Vignali, who was inspired by classical precedent in 1525 to publish La Cazzaria

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Supposedly it was defeated by the dramatic intervention of Paphnutius, an avowedly celibate Egyptian bishop and heroic survivor of persecution, ‘roaring at the top of his voice’ that his choice of continence should not be arbitrarily imposed by others. This story comes from a century later, in the writings of the Church historian Socrates of Constantinople, and may itself be a fiction that was part of an ongoing and unresolved argument. [41] At one extreme of that debate was a logical extension of the newly emerging role of the Church within Roman imperial structures: encouragement of clerical dynasties. It was a natural assumption among the Roman upper classes that son should follow father in the same honourable position. In 349 that led the Emperor Constantius II to propose legislation that the Christian priesthood should become a hereditary caste, like some levels of imperial officialdom. Although this met too much opposition from bishops to become a reality, the idea, and versions of it in practice, did not die away, as we will see in different settings and centuries. [42] At the other extreme was the effort of Bishop Eustathius of Sebaste in Armenia, who allegedly encouraged people to boycott liturgies performed by married priests; Eustathius faced condemnation at a Synod at Gangra in Asia Minor around 340, and his historian admirer Sozomen later sought to excuse him, clearly embarrassed. [43] Between these two polarities was the effort of Ambrose of Milan to make ordination the moment to separate sexual activity from marriage, so that clergy previously could ‘have had sons, [but] not continue to have sons’. [44] This concession was not so authoritative as to prevent bishops having wives and more children, as mindful as any other Roman paterfamilias of their dynastic duties. Thus, Ambrose’s contemporary the wealthy and cultured Synesius of Cyrene in Libya was not going to resort to subterfuge. He made it clear to the Patriarch of Alexandria that he would only become Bishop of the Libyan city of Ptolemais if it did not interfere with his marriage; his prayers would continue to include his firm wish ‘to have virtuous children’. He was not alone. [45] Far to the west, one contrasts a continuing and repeated hard line from Spanish bishops against clerical marriage generally with gravestones dateable to the fifth and sixth centuries in the western fringe of the former Roman Britannia, what is now north Wales: one specifically refers to a bishop’s wife, and another to a cleric’s wife, which emphasizes that she was ‘a most holy woman’. [46] Generally, no doubt, as the decades rolled on in a marriage, most senior clergy and their wives were reasonably content to leave sex behind, and in the life and practice of the Church that joint decision was not something that required public discussion.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Queens went on endowing monasteries for women in the tenth century, but no longer did their abbesses rule over men as well, and generally religious life for women was much diminished, with far fewer and less well-endowed foundations than for monks. [42] The radical change was symbolized when Æthelthryth/Etheldreda’s monastery at Ely was refounded in 970 after Viking destruction. Now it became an all-male monastic community, and so it remained thereafter, with the unspoken historical embarrassment that its flourishing and profitable pilgrimage cult was focused on royal holy women of previous centuries. Later monks in the magnificently rebuilt Romanesque Ely Cathedral even balanced that inescapable femininity by carefully creating a shrine to seven worthy Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian males from more recent times, so that pilgrims might pay them devotion before they made their way onwards to the main attraction of Etheldreda’s grave. [43]

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  This reading of the original text nevertheless already worried later generations of Hebrew readers, which has resulted in a good deal of confusion in its transmission. The Greek of the Septuagint kept the final phrase candidly but awkwardly as ‘until a (or the) great consummation’, and one surviving early Latin translation followed suit. [30] By contrast, other alarmed early commentators moulded a new direction for the phrase, with David ‘weeping the more’ than Jonathan’s tears; these included the early Christian Syriac translation known as the Peshitta , and later the Vulgate, the classic fourth-century Latin translation by Jerome of Stridon, who was no friend to sexual activity of any sort. That has been a lifeline for those modern translators embarrassed by any suggestion of physicality in the relationship of David and Jonathan; so on this matter, Evangelical Protestant scholars uncharacteristically side with the Pope’s translator Jerome rather than those of Protestant King James. None of them can do much about a much less disputable text, 1 Sam. 20.30, where the relationship is said to be ‘to the shame of your mother’s nakedness’. That clearly implies something sexual. [31] The shame implied in 1 Sam. 20.30 is not going to please modern advocates for gay rights, but it is not the overall tone of the David/Jonathan story, which lacks any other element of moralizing (and of course pairs it with multiple heterosexual exploits on David’s part). In fact, its sexual element is secondary but significantly complementary to its political purpose. Whatever the original truth of the tale, if any, the elaborate exposition is clearly intended to deal with the embarrassment of David’s usurpation and his murder of his king: the natural heir, Jonathan, passes his royal right over to the usurper by the intensity of his love. [32] As a piece of Solomonic royal propaganda, it comes from much the same chronological era as the Greek epic in which Achilles and Patroklos cemented their passion for each other. It did not have successors in the Hebrew Bible (see Plate 20). * When Jews turned with relief from problematic same-sex to male–female relationships, they could contemplate the Hebrew Bible’s wholly extraordinary anthology of love-poems gathered with the formal title of Song of Songs or Song of Solomon (introduced above in Chapter 1). The collection is all the more strange because, despite the general Jewish insistence on the uniqueness of marriage and unthinking Christian assumptions often made about the text today, it does not concern itself at all with weddings or marriage. Its picture of male–female love is entirely the reverse of the obsessive theme of female betrayal in Hosea or Ezekiel: it consistently proclaims that the woman yearns desperately for her lover, who is quick to respond.

• From The Girls (2016)

  My spot by the pool had been occupied by a gossipy scrum of wives: from across the yard, I heard my father’s booming laugh, the group surrounding him laughing as well. I pulled my dress down, awkwardly, missing the weight of a glass in my hands. Tamar’s boyfriend was standing nearby, eating ribs. “You’re Carl’s daughter,” he said, “right?” I remember thinking it was strange that he and Tamar had floated apart, that he was just standing by himself, powering through his plate. It was strange that he would even want to talk to me. I nodded. “Nice house,” he said, his mouth full. Lips bright and wet from the ribs. He was handsome, I saw, but there was something cartoonish about him, the upturn of his nose. The extra ruff of skin under his chin. “So much land,” he added. “It was my grandparents’ house.” His eyes shifted. “I heard about her,” he said. “Your grandmother. I used to watch her when I was little.” I didn’t realize how drunk he was until that moment. His tongue lingering in the corner of his mouth. “That episode where she finds the alligator in the fountain. Classic.” I was used to people speaking of my grandmother fondly. How they liked to perform their admiration, tell me that they’d grown up with her on their television screens, beamed into their living rooms like another, better, family member. “Makes sense,” the boyfriend said, looking around. “That this was her place. ’Cause your old man couldn’t afford it, no way.” I understood that he was insulting my father. “It’s just strange,” he said, wiping his lips with his hand. “What your mother puts up with.” My face must have been blank: he waggled his fingers in the direction of Tamar, still at the bar. My father had joined her. My mother was nowhere in sight. Tamar’s bracelets were making noise as she waved her glass. She and my father were just talking. Nothing was happening. I didn’t get why her boyfriend was smiling so rabidly, waiting for me to say something. “Your father fucks anything he can,” he said. “Can I take your plate?” I asked, too stunned to flinch. That was something I’d learned from my mother: revert to politeness. Cut pain with a gesture of civility. Like Jackie Kennedy. It was a virtue to that generation, an ability to divert discomfort, tamp it down with ceremony. But it was out of fashion now, and I saw something like disdain in his eyes when he handed me his plate. Though maybe that is something I imagined. —The party ended after dark. A few of the tiki torches stayed lit, sending their bleary flames streaking into the navy night. The vivid oversize cars lumbering down the driveway, my father calling out goodbyes while my mother stacked napkins and brushed olive pits, washed in other people’s saliva, into her open palm.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Church institutions everywhere found it difficult to formulate a coherent reaction to these sudden incursions of lesbian and gay activism within Christianity; they could not be ignored or simply othered, as might at first have seemed possible in response to the sudden eruption of secular gay anger against public repression that famously produced a week of rioting against the New York police around the Stonewall gay bar in 1969. In England, many gay Anglo-Catholics were particularly disconcerted by an eruption of Christian lesbian and gay openness that paid little respect to their carefully bounded historic sub-culture (unsympathetically summed up by one informed observer as ‘gin, lace and backbiting’). [13] The dilemma was wider than that: one phenomenon of the 1980s was the embarrassment of gay Anglican bishops when their silence about their sexuality was challenged as hypocrisy by those who were no longer silent. Was it a Christian act to ‘out’ them without their consent? The tabloid press was gleeful. The problem of double standards has continued to challenge numerous conservative gay politicians and clergy in the public eye across the world. [14] A decade or more of indecision among Western Churches as gay equality was asserted more in Western society generally, as well as in the Church, was terminated by a new brutal reality. From 1981 reports made clear the emergence across the world of a sexually transmitted disease as devastating in its effects as syphilis had been in the sixteenth century, but more rapid in its transmission thanks to the global interlinking of modern society: Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). From the early 1980s till now, AIDS may have brought premature death to more than 30 million people, and a greater number are currently living with the virus that causes it, Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). It gradually became apparent as this new medical terminology was hastily forced into precision that the origins of the pandemic appeared to have been in Africa, but by 1981 HIV and consequent deaths were already widely dispersed, and in the United States one of the worst affected categories were sexually active gay men. The virus had capitalized on a gay culture that had revelled in its new sexual freedom and acted accordingly, so that infection was sexually transmitted via bodily fluids. Young, healthy males were prominent among those dying, at first with little hope of survival. Grief was mixed with terror of the unknown, and commentators who had hated the permissive society and the ‘New Morality’ exhibited a good deal of Schadenfreude masquerading as old morality. A widespread conservative reaction was that AIDS was God’s wrath on homosexuality; it was not explained why God did not seem so wrathful against lesbians, who turned out to be among those least affected by the epidemic, while he was instead showing a great deal of wrath towards male and female Africans generally, despite the mushroom growth of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa.

• From Laura Middleton; Her Brother and Her Lover (1890)

  As I felt he was watching me, I endeavoured to keep my countenance as well as I could, but I was aware that the blood mounting in my cheeks must to some extent betray the secret interest I took in the subject. I though the best plan was to acknowledge that from our early intimacy, and the kindness she had always shown me, I did take a great interest in her, and that it was perhaps only my being sensible that she could neither look up to nor respect one so much younger than herself that prevented this feeling from ripening into a warmer attachment, but that I was old enough to be able to wish to promote her happiness even if I could not myself be the means of doing so, and that from what I had seen of her feelings towards him, I had always thought they might be happy together, and consequently had wished him success. He pressed me very much regarding what she thought, or might have said of him. I told him that of course it was not a subject on which I could have ventured to speak to her seriously, that sometimes a looker-on saw more of the game than the players, and that I thought she did like him and was only restrained from showing it more by his not urging his suit so much as he perhaps might have done. We had some further conversation on the subject, and I added that I knew she was of a reserved disposition as regarded her own feelings and did not like to have them noticed and commented on by strangers and that perhaps the idea of all the parade and show which he might think necessary at the celebration of his marriage and the discussion of the matter for months previously might annoy her, while she would probably have been more easily induced to consent had he been a person of less rank and consequence, when all this exhibition would have been avoided. He said that if she had any difficulty on this ground, nothing could be easier than to obviate it, for as far as he was concerned it would give him the greatest satisfaction to dispense with all formalities, except necessary settlements which he would take care should not occupy much time, and they might be quietly married at their own church in the neighbourhood without making any fuss about it; that with the exception of his mother and sister he had no relations he cared anything about or whom he would wish to be present, so that Laura could have everything her own way. Without attempting to urge too much, I gave him to understand that I thought he had better come to an explanation with her as soon as possible and make her aware of his ideas on these points. And I promised to endeavor to ascertain her wishes as far as I could, and make him acquainted with them.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “He jumped in.” Tom’s panic was reverberating through his whole body, his pants and shirt sopping. The wet suck of his shoes. “So?” Tom was wide-eyed, not understanding that trying to explain would make it worse. “I thought he’d fallen into the pool.” “But there’s water in there,” Helen said. “That wet stuff,” Donna said, sniggering. “The kid’s fine,” Suzanne said. “You scared him.” “Glug glug glug.” A fit of giggling overtook Helen. “You thought he was dead or something?” “He still could have drowned,” Tom said, his voice going high. “No one was watching him. He’s too young to really swim.” “Your face,” Donna said. “God, you’re all freaked, aren’t you?” The sight of Tom wringing the biological stink of pool water from his shirt. The junk in the yard catching the light. Nico got to his feet, shaking out his hair. Sniffing a little with his weird childish dignity. The girls were laughing, all of them, so Nico trundled off easily, no one noticing his departure. And I pretended I hadn’t worried, either, that I’d known everything was fine, because Tom seemed pathetic, his panic right on the surface with no place to retreat, and even the kid was mad at him. I was ashamed for bringing him around, for how he’d caused such a fuss, and Suzanne was staring at me, so I knew exactly what a stupid idea it had been. Tom looked at me for help, but he saw the distance in my face, the way I slid my eyes back to the ground. “I just think you should be careful,” Tom said. Suzanne snorted. “We should be careful?” “I was a lifeguard,” he said, his voice cracking. “People can drown even in shallow water.” But Suzanne wasn’t listening, making a face at Donna. Their shared disgust including me, I thought. I couldn’t bear it. “Relax,” I said to Tom. Tom looked wounded. “This is an awful place.” “You should leave, then,” Suzanne said. “Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?” The rattle of speed in her, the vacant, vicious smile—she was being meaner than she needed to be. “Can I talk to you for a second?” Tom said to me. Suzanne laughed. “Oh, man. Here we go.” “Just for a second,” he said. When I hesitated, Suzanne sighed. “Go talk to him,” she said. “Christ.” Tom walked away from the others and I followed him with halting steps, as if distance could prevent contagion. I kept glancing back to the group, the girls heading to the porch. I wanted to be among them. I was furious with Tom, his silly pants, his thatchy hair. “What?” I said. Impatient, my lips tight. “I don’t know,” Tom said, “I just think—” He hesitated, darting a look at the house, pulling at his shirt. “You can come back with me right now, if you want. There’s a party tonight,” he said. “At the International House.” I could picture it.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  63 . P. Caraman, Ignatius Loyola: A biography of the founder of the Jesuits (New York, 1990), provides details not otherwise referenced below. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63 64 . For further comment, see MacCulloch, Christianity , 661–2; on prostitute rescue work embarrassment, O. Hufton, ‘Altruism and reciprocity: the early Jesuits and their female patrons’, Renaissance Studies 15 (2001), 328–53, at 333. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64 65 . Hufton, ‘Altruism and reciprocity’, 336, 340–41. The surviving son of this marriage, inheriting his father’s title of Duke of Parma, played a crucial role in the Counter-Reformation in the Netherlands as Governor of the Habsburg possessions for twenty-one years. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65 66 . J. W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 306–7. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66 67 . On the Society and Protestantism, ibid., 274–5, 278; on education, ibid., ch. 6. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67 68 . Caraman, Ignatius Loyola , 135–7; Hufton, ‘Altruism and reciprocity’, 337. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68 69 . A good account of Ward is provided by P. Harriss, ‘Mary Ward in her own writings’, Recusant History 30 (2010), 229–39; I am also indebted to my conversations about Ward with Gemma Simmonds. On Stackpole and Limerick, see B. McShane, ‘Negotiating religious change and conflict: female religious communities in early modern Ireland, c .1530– c .1641’, British Catholic History 33 (2017), 357– 82, at 370. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69 70 . Q. Mazzonis, Spirituality, Gender, and the Self in Renaissance Italy: Angela Merici and the Company of St Ursula (1474 – 1540) (Washington, DC, 2007). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70 71 . See commentary and text of one late medieval version of the legend in K. A. Winstead (ed.), Chaste Passions: Medieval English virgin martyr legends (Ithaca, NY and London, 2000), 164–8. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71 72 . For an introduction to the Ursulines, see Evangelisti, Nuns , chs. 6 and 7. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72 73 . O. Hufton, ‘The widow’s mite and other strategies: funding the Catholic Reformation’, TRHS 6th ser. 8 (1998), 117–37, at 134–6. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73 74 . On the Daughters of Charity, founded by Louise de Marillac and the priest Vincent de Paul, see Evangelisti, Nuns , 224–30. For further examples of similar work also involving Canada, see E. Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in seventeenth century France (Montreal, 1990), esp. chs. 4, 5. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74 75 . K. Liebreich, Fallen Order: A history (London, 2004), from which the outline of this story is taken. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75 76 . Ibid., 75. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76 77 . Ibid., 8, 78, 213–14. The Piarists were of course not unique as a religious Order in which sexual abuse took place; what was exceptional was the way in which they were so quickly and thoroughly subverted by abusers.

• From The Girls (2016)

  They wondered aloud whether the actress had actually been getting fucked. They didn’t seem to care that I was standing right there. “You can tell she liked it,” Henry said. “Ooh,” he crowed in a high feminine voice. “Ooh, yeah, mmm.” He banged the slot machine with his hips. “I saw it, too.” I spoke before thinking. I wanted an entry point in the conversation, even if it was a lie. They both looked at me. “Well,” Henry said, “the ghost finally speaks.” I flushed. “You saw it?” Peter seemed doubtful. I told myself he was being protective. “Yeah,” I said. “Pretty wild.” They exchanged a glance. Did I really think they’d believe I had somehow gotten a ride to the city? That I’d gone to see what was, essentially, a porno? “So.” Henry’s eyes glinted. “What was your favorite part?” “That part you were talking about,” I said. “With the girl.” “But what part of that did you like best?” Henry said. “Leave her alone,” Peter said mildly. Already bored. “Did you like the Christmas scene?” Henry continued. His smile lulled me into thinking we were having a real conversation, that I was making progress. “The big tree? All the snow?” I nodded. Almost believing my own lie. Henry laughed. “The movie was in Fiji. The whole thing’s on an island.” Henry was snorting, helpless with laughter, and cut a look at Peter, who seemed embarrassed for me, like you would be embarrassed for a stranger who tripped on the street, like nothing had ever happened between us at all. I pushed Henry’s motorcycle. I hadn’t expected it to tip over, not really: maybe just wobble, just enough to interrupt Henry so he’d be scared for a second, so he’d make some jokey exclamations of dismay and forget my lie. But I had pushed with real force. The motorcycle fell over and crunched hard on the cement floor. Henry stared at me. “You little bitch.” He hurried to the downed

• From The Girls (2016)

  You know I have to do that with McGinley, Sam, all those retards.” They were drunk, the three of them, and maybe I was, too, the ceiling drab with expired smoke. We’d shared a burly joint, a sexual droop descending on Zav. A pleased, overcome squint. Sasha had drawn further into herself, though she’d unzipped her sweatshirt, her chest sunless and crossed with faint blue veins. Her eye makeup was heavier than it had been: I didn’t know when she’d put more on. I got to my feet when we finished eating. “I’ve got to do a few things,” I said. They made halfhearted efforts to get me to stay, but I waved them off. I closed the door to the bedroom, though bits of their conversation slipped through. “I respect you,” Julian was saying to Zav, “I always have, man, ever since Scarlet was like, You have to meet this guy.” Performing an extravagant admiration, the stoned person’s tendency toward optimistic summary. Zav responded, resuming their practiced volley. I could hear Sasha’s silence. —When I passed through later, nothing had really changed. Sasha was still listening to their conversation like she’d be tested someday. Julian’s and Zav’s intoxication had passed into a strenuous state, their hairlines wet with sweat. “Are we being too loud?” Julian asked. That weird politeness again, how easily it clicked in. “Not at all,” I said. “Just getting some water.” “Sit with us,” Zav said, studying me. “Talk.” “That’s okay.” “Come on, Evie,” Julian said. The odd intimacy of my name in his mouth surprised me. The table was stamped with rings from the bottles, the litter of dinner. I started to clear the dishes. “You don’t have to do that,” Julian said, scooting back so I could reach his plate. “You cooked,” I said. Sasha made a peep of thanks when I added her plate to the stack. Zav’s phone lit up, shivering across the surface of the table. Someone was calling: a blurry photograph of a woman in underwear flashed on the screen. “Is that Lexi?” Julian asked. Zav nodded, ignoring the call. A look passed between Julian and Zav: I didn’t want to notice it. Zav belched. They both laughed. I could smell the memory of chewed meat. “Benny is doing computer shit now,” Zav said, “you know that?” Julian hit the table. “No fucking way.” I walked the dishes to the sink, gathering the balled paper towels from the counter. Sweeping crumbs into my hand. “He’s fat as fuck,” Zav said, “it’s hilarious.” “Is Benny the guy from your high school?” Sasha asked. Julian nodded. I let the sink fill with water. Watching Julian swivel his body to mirror Sasha’s, knocking his knees into hers. He kissed her on the temple. “You guys are too fucking much,” Zav said. His tone had a tricky bite. I sank the dishes in the water. A scummy network of grease formed on the surface.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  I got recompensed, I was buying cloth with it,’ and she went off into some balderdash about not being answerable for the house management that allowed unclean powers on to the fifth floor, making life unbearable. Here the investigator waved at Annushka with his pen, because everyone was properly sick of her, and wrote a pass for her to get out on a green slip of paper, after which, to everyone’s pleasure, Annushka disappeared from the building. Then there followed one after another a whole series of people, Nikolai Ivanovich among them, just arrested owing solely to the foolishness of his jealous wife, who towards morning had informed the police that her husband had vanished. Nikolai Ivanovich did not surprise the investigators very much when he laid on the table the clownish certificate of his having spent the time at Satan’s ball. In his stories of how he had carried Margarita Nikolaevna’s naked maid on his back through the air, somewhere to hell and beyond, for a swim in a river, and of the preceding appearance of the bare Margarita Nikolaevna in the window, Nikolai Ivanovich departed somewhat from the truth. Thus, for instance, he did not consider it necessary to mention that he had arrived in the bedroom with the discarded shift in his hands, or that he had called Natasha ‘Venus’. From his words it looked as if Natasha had flown out the window, got astride him, and dragged him away from Moscow . . . ‘Obedient to constraint, I was compelled to submit,’ Nikolai Ivanovich said, and finished his tale with a request that not a word of it be told to his wife. Which was promised him. The testimony of Nikolai Ivanovich provided an opportunity for establishing that Margarita Nikolaevna as well as her maid Natasha had vanished without a trace. Measures were taken to find them. Thus every second of Saturday morning was marked by the unrelenting investigation. In the city during that time, completely impossible rumours emerged and floated about, in which a tiny portion of truth was embellished with the most luxuriant lies.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The artiste advanced to the prompter’s box and rubbed his hands. ‘All sitting?’ 3 he asked in a soft baritone and smiled to the house. ‘Sitting, sitting,’ a chorus of tenors and basses answered from the house. ‘Hm . . .’ the artiste began pensively, ‘and how you’re not sick of it I just don’t understand! Everybody else is out walking around now, enjoying the spring sun and the warmth, and you’re stuck in here on the floor of a stuffy theatre! Is the programme so interesting? Tastes differ, however,’ the artiste concluded philosophically. Then he changed both the timbre of his voice and its intonation, and announced gaily and resoundingly: ‘And now for the next number on our programme—Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, chairman of a house committee and director of a dietetic eatery. Nikanor Ivanovich, on-stage!’ General applause greeted the artiste. The surprised Nikanor Ivanovich goggled his eyes, while the master of ceremonies, blocking the glare of the footlights with his hand, located him among the sitters and tenderly beckoned him on-stage with his finger. And Nikanor Ivanovich, without knowing how, found himself on-stage. Beams of coloured light struck his eyes from in front and below, which at once caused the house and the audience to sink into darkness. ‘Well, Nikanor Ivanovich, set us a good example, sir,’ the young artiste said soulfully, ‘turn over your currency.’ Silence ensued. Nikanor Ivanovich took a deep breath and quietly began to speak: ‘I swear to God that I . . .’ But before he had time to get the words out, the whole house burst into shouts of indignation. Nikanor Ivanovich got confused and fell silent. ‘As far as I understand you,’ said the programme announcer, ‘you wanted to swear to God that you haven’t got any currency?’, and he gazed sympathetically at Nikanor Ivanovich. ‘Exactly right, I haven’t,’ replied Nikanor Ivanovich. ‘Right,’ responded the artiste, ‘and . . . excuse the indiscretion, where did the four hundred dollars that were found in the privy of the apartment of which you and your wife are the sole inhabitants come from?’ ‘Magic!’ someone in the dark house said with obvious irony. ‘Exactly right—magic,’ Nikanor Ivanovich timidly replied, vaguely addressing either the artiste or the dark house, and he explained: ‘Unclean powers, the checkered interpreter stuck me with them.’ And again the house raised an indignant roar.