Excitement

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 Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  He laughed wryly, and threw off his clothes. It was too much. He jumped out, naked and white, with a little shiver, into the hard slanting rain. Flossie sprang before him with a frantic little bark. Connie, her hair all wet and sticking to her head, turned her hot face and saw him. Her blue eyes blazed with excitement as she turned and ran fast, with a strange charging movement, out of the clearing and down the path, the wet boughs whipping her. She ran, and he saw nothing but the round wet head, the wet back leaning forward in flight, the rounded buttocks twinkling: a wonderful cowering female nakedness in flight. She was nearly at the wide riding when he came up and flung his naked arm round her soft, naked-wet middle. She gave a shriek and straightened herself, and the heap of her soft, chill flesh came up against his body. He pressed it all up against him, madly, the heap of soft, chilled female flesh that became quickly warm as flame, in contact. The rain streamed on them till they smoked. He gathered her lovely, heavy posteriors one in each hand and pressed them in towards him in a frenzy, quivering motionless in the rain. Then suddenly he tipped her up and fell with her on the path, in the roaring silence of the rain, and short and sharp, he took her, short and sharp and finished, like an animal. He got up in an instant, wiping the rain from his eyes. "Come in," he said, and they started running back to the hut. He ran straight and swift: he didn't like the rain. But she came slower, gathering forget-me-nots and campion and bluebells, running a few steps and watching him fleeting away from her. When she came with her flowers, panting to the hut, he had already started a fire, and the twigs were crackling. Her sharp breasts rose and fell, her hair was plastered down with rain, her face was flushed ruddy and her body glistened and trickled. Wide-eyed and breathless, with a small wet head and full, trickling, naive haunches, she looked another creature. He took the old sheet and rubbed her down, she standing like a child. Then he rubbed himself, having shut the door of the hut. The fire was blazing up. She ducked her head in the other end of the sheet, and rubbed her wet hair. "We're drying ourselves together on the same towel, we shall quarrel!" he said. She looked up for a moment, her hair all odds and ends. "No!" she said, her eyes wide. "It's not a towel, it's a sheet." And she went on busily rubbing her head, while he busily rubbed his.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  We daily discussed together plans of the fight, but beyond the holding of public meetings I could not then think of any other programme. I felt myself at a loss to discover how to offer civil disobedience against the Rowlatt Bill if it was finally passed into law. One could disobey it only if the Government gave one the opportunity for it. Failing that, could we civilly disobey other laws? And if so, where was the line to be drawn? These and a host of similar questions formed the theme of these discussions of ours. Sjt. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar called together a small conference of leaders to thrash out the matter. Among those who took a conspicuous part in it was Sjt. Vijayaraghavachari. He suggested that I should draw up a comprehensive manual of the science of Satyagraha, embodying even minute details. I felt the task to be beyond my capacity, and I confessed as much to him. While these cogitations were still going on, news was received that the Rowlatt Bill had been published as an Act. That night I fell asleep while thinking over the question. Towards the small hours of the morning I woke up somewhat earlier than usual. I was still in that twilight condition between sleep and consciousness when suddenly the idea broke upon me—it was as if in a dream. Early in the morning I related the whole story to Rajagopalachari. ‘The idea came to me last night in a dream that we should call upon the country to observe a general hartal. Satyagraha is a process of self-purification, and ours is a sacred fight, and it seems to me to be in the fitness of things that it should be commenced with an act of self- purification. Let all the people of India, therefore, suspend their business on that day and observe the day as one of fasting and prayer. The Musalmans may not fast for more than one day; so the duration of the fast should be twenty-four hours. It is very difficult to say whether all the provinces would respond to this appeal of ours or not, but I feel fairly sure of Bombay, Madras, Bihar and Sindh. I think we should have every reason to feel satisfied even if all these places observe the hartal fittingly.’ Rajagopalachari was at once taken up with my suggestion. Other friends too welcomed it when it was communicated to them later. I drafted a brief appeal. The date of the hartal was first fixed on the 30th March 1919, but was subsequently changed to 6th April. The people thus had only a short notice of the hartal. As the work had to be started at once, it was hardly possible to give longer notice. But who knows how it all came about? The whole of India from one end to the other, towns as well as villages, observed a complete hartal on that day. It was a most wonderful spectacle. 157THAT MEMORABLE WEEK !

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  “Was her experience with that satisfactory?” On a memo pad, Tyre wrote, “Anne-Marie’s file—slave named Roxanne. Okay?” Georgia ripped the note off and disappeared into the computer room to call up the record and get a hard copy. Tyre could hear the printer running. “Well, I’m very pleased with the results since my favorite thing to do is thrash someone severely and then fuck them up the ass, and I never met anybody who could take it like Roxanne. I think she might even be able to get fisted.” Tyre clicked her tongue. This crude talk was refreshing. “Ambitious, aren’t you? Is that what you’re calling to arrange?” “Not exactly. I want something more complicated than that. It would be nice if we could slip that in somewhere, though.” “So to speak,” Tyre said. Georgia laid Roxanne’s file on her desk. At the top, Anne-Marie had entered, in bold capital letters, “BOTTOMLESS PIT.” Tyre raised her eyebrows. Anne-Marie’s resources were not easily depleted. “Perhaps we should discuss your proposal in person,” she murmured. “Are you free for luncheon any time this week?” “Today, as a matter of fact.” She wrote, “Company for lunch, make extra margaritas,” on her memo pad, underlined it, and showed it to Georgia, who smiled and pantomimed clapping her hands. Tyre gave Alex the address. “Security will buzz you in, and my private secretary will be downstairs to show you up to my suite. Are you a vegetarian?” “I am a confirmed carnivore.” “Excellent.” She put the receiver down very gently. She was excited, and it wouldn’t do to drop it. The fact that the next item on the agenda was going through adult-film catalogs and ordering a new batch of lesbian videos did not ease the tension. She kept thinking that she was going to run off to the bathroom and masturbate, but she put if off so often that Alex arrived (ten minutes early, such a top’s trick) before she had a chance to find out exactly how wet she was. Instead, she was in the lunch room (and out of character) setting the table. She had expected someone Anne-Marie’s age. But the woman who strode easily, a bit arrogantly, toward her was young—twenty-five at the most. She was tall (although not as tall as Tyre herself) and had the thick neck of a body-builder. She had a broad face with high cheekbones and almond-shaped brown eyes. Her head had been shaved about a month ago, so a short nap of black velvet covered her scalp. She was wearing black-leather pants with a studded crotch-piece, engineer boots, and an old, cracked black-leather jacket. The kidney panel, shoulders, and arms of the jacket were heavily padded.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  When the lights went up on a dazed and uncomfortably exposed audience, she said something like, “I bet each of you, especially the women in this room, could give me a list right now of all the things you didn’t like in the films we just watched. Women are really good at critiquing sex. But before you do that, try to identify one or two scenes that really got you off. They might even be some of the same scenes that you found offensive or disturbing. Pay attention to those scenes; they can teach you a lot about yourself, and that information is worth knowing.” This is excellent advice to follow while reading Macho Sluts . It is important to pay attention to what passes the “wet (or hard) test.” What turns out to be especially compelling in this collection will say a great deal more about the reader than it does about the relative quality of the various stories. For example, the fact that “The Vampire” and “The Hustler” both work so well for me, while I can barely get through “The Finishing School,” doesn’t just speak to my preference for sci-fi over Victorian school-girl fantasies, but also about my taste for butch women and rough trade over highly mannered mistresses. I always find “The Surprise Party” and “The Spoiler” hot in part because they remind me of my enthusiasm for cock (whether flesh or silicone). Readers who have different literary and erotic tastes will have a different set of favorites. For those who have little practice with pornography, it might also be helpful to keep in mind that porn is meant to be read in snatches; the point is not to race through to find out what happens at the end. The stories in Macho Sluts were written in the 1980s and in some ways reflect that period of now-closed lesbian bars like Maud’s and Amelia’s, easy-access pay phones, and ongoing sex wars. But what is just as striking as the historical references is what is historically absent: while condoms and gloves accompany the sex scenes in these pages, and a vampire worries about the possibility of “tainted blood,” the AIDS epidemic that so consumed the gay community in 1988 is otherwise invisible. Macho Sluts instead offers an alternative universe in which sex is uncoupled from the ongoing reality of death and dying from AIDS. For example, at a time when the only public sex venues for women were private parties or rented space in heterosexual or gay men’s clubs (and even those limited venues were being closed in an effort to contain the spread of HIV), Califia envisions a sex club so popular that women wind around the block three deep to get in on the weekends.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  “So do my high heels,” Tyre said. “Damascus steel. So decorative.” Alex spared a quick look at her feet. It was true. Then Tyre threw a side-kick at her, and she saw that the spike heels were also made out of steel. The skin-tight, hot-pink jumpsuit did not hamper her opponent at all. Alex parried the kick and punched. Her fist was blocked by a hard forearm. They sparred enough to make each other breathe hard, get a sweat to pop up. Somehow they wound up with their hands on each other’s hips, pressed together from the waist down, staring at each other’s mouths and eyes. When Tyre’s hand went for the zipper on her jacket, Alex reached for the neck of her jumpsuit and there were two simultaneous ripping noises as they each exposed the other’s torso. Alex did not wear anything under the jacket, and Tyre was bare beneath the spandex. Their breasts were nearly the same size. If anything, Alex’s were bigger, and the feel of her hard nipple between Tyre’s slim fingers made her grab for a similar target. She came up with metal as well as flesh. There were small silver rings in Tyre’s nipples. “You’re sweating,” Tyre grinned. “Brings out the smell of the leather. Or is that cunt? Shall I bring it out a little more? So we can tell?” She twisted the nipple a quarter-turn, crushed it. Alex grinned at her and judiciously applied exactly the same amount of pressure to the teat she held, then twisted it past that point. “Gonna tell me you don’t sweat, you glow?” she asked Tyre. “Looks like sweat to me. Looks good on you, like maybe you’re working hard for a change.” “I don’t mind working hard, and I don’t think you mind my being hard on you. You like this,” Tyre accused her, getting a grip on the other nipple and stretching them both out, until Alex saw tiny white stars. “I like this,” Alex affirmed, and returned the hurt worse, until their hips slid past each other and their thighs interlocked, the long bone of the leg and the muscle over it pressed into the other woman’s mound, pushing the sensitive, swollen tissue back down until it flattened against the pubic bone. Hard and soft, hard and soft, their hands played on each other’s bodies, and they rocked in each other’s arms, seeking advantage, grappling. It was a kind of wrestling with no attempt to throw, but a quest for domination nonetheless. They both yelped at the same moment, but not from the pain of well-manipulated nipples. Their thighs separated momentarily, startled by the intensity of this pleasure, and its brevity. They groped for each other’s crotches. The sound of Tyre’s zipper was a long, continuous wail punctuated with a few sharp snaps as Alex’s studded crotch-piece was pulled off and dropped on the floor. “You’re wet,” Alex said. “Thirsty?” Tyre spit.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "Am I temptation!" she said, stroking his face. "I'm so glad I'm temptation to you! Don't let's think about it! You frighten me when you start thinking: you roll me out flat. Don't let's think about it. We can think so much when we are apart. That's the whole point! I've been thinking, I _must_ come to you for another night before I go. I must come once more to the cottage. Shall I come on Thursday night?" "Isn't that when your sister will be there?" "Yes! But she said we would start at teatime. So we could start at teatime. But she could sleep somewhere else and I could sleep with you." "But then she'd have to know." "Oh, I shall tell her. I've more or less told her already. I must talk it all over with Hilda. She's a great help, so sensible." He was thinking of her plan. "So you'd start off from Wragby at teatime, as if you were going to London? Which way were you going?" "By Nottingham and Grantham." "And then your sister would drop you somewhere and you'd walk or drive back here? Sounds very risky, to me." "Does it? Well then, Hilda could bring me back. She could sleep at Mansfield, and bring me back here in the evening, and fetch me again in the morning. It's quite easy." "And the people who see you?" "I'll wear goggles and a veil." He pondered for some time. "Well," he said. "You please yourself, as usual." "But wouldn't it please you?" "Oh, yes! It'd please me all right," he said a little grimly. "I might as well smite while the iron's hot." "Do you know what I thought?" she said suddenly. "It suddenly came to me. You are the 'Knight of the Burning Pestle'!" "Ay! And you? Are you the Lady of the Red-Hot Mortar?" "Yes!" she said. "Yes! You're Sir Pestle and I'm Lady Mortar." "All right, then I'm knighted. John Thomas is Sir John, to your Lady Jane." "Yes! John Thomas is knighted! I'm my-lady-maiden-hair, and you must have flowers too. Yes!" She threaded two pink campions in the bush of red-gold hair above his penis. "There!" she said. "Charming! Charming! Sir John!" And she pushed a bit of forget-me-not in the dark hair of his breast. "And you won't forget me _there_, will you?" she kissed him on the breast, and made two bits of forget-me-not lodge one over each nipple, kissing him again. "Make a calendar of me!" he said. He laughed, and the flowers shook from his breast. "Wait a bit!" he said. He rose, and opened the door of the hut. Flossie, lying in the porch, got up and looked at him. "Ay, it's me!" he said. The rain had ceased. There was a wet, heavy, perfumed stillness. Evening was approaching.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Among other monstrosities in this lumber room was a largish black japanned box, excellently and ingeniously made some sixty or seventy years ago, and fitted with every imaginable object. On top was a concentrated toilet set: brushes, bottles, mirrors, combs, boxes, even three beautiful little razors in safety sheaths, shaving bowl and all. Underneath came a sort of escritoire outfit: blotters, pens, ink bottles, paper, envelopes, memorandum books: and then a perfect sewing outfit with three different-sized scissors, thimbles, needles, silks and cottons, darning egg, all of the very best quality and perfectly finished. Then there was a little medicine store, with bottles labelled Laudanum, Tincture of Myrrh, Ess. Cloves and so on: but empty. Everything was perfectly new, and the whole thing, when shut up, was as big as a small, but fat weekend bag. And inside, it fitted together like a puzzle. The bottles could not possibly have spilled: there wasn't room. The thing was wonderfully made and contrived, excellent craftsmanship of the Victorian order. But somehow it was monstrous. Some Chatterley must even have felt it, for the thing had never been used. It had a peculiar soullessness. Yet Mrs. Bolton was thrilled. "Look what beautiful brushes, so expensive, even the shaving brushes, three perfect ones! No! and those scissors! They're the best that money could buy. Oh, I call it lovely!" "Do you?" said Connie. "Then you have it." "Oh no, my Lady!" "Of course! It will only lie here till Doomsday. If you won't have it, I'll send it to the Duchess as well as the pictures, and she doesn't deserve so much. Do have it!" "Oh your Ladyship! Why I shall never be able to thank you." "You needn't try," laughed Connie. And Mrs. Bolton sailed down with the huge and very black box in her arms, flushing bright pink in her excitement. Mr. Betts drove her in the trap to her house in the village, with the box. And she _had_ to have a few friends in, to show it: the schoolmistress, the chemist's wife, Mrs. Weedon the under-cashier's wife. They thought it marvellous. And then started the whisper of Lady Chatterley's child. "Wonders'll never cease!" said Mrs. Weedon. But Mrs. Bolton was _convinced_, if it did come, it would be Sir Geoffrey's child. So there! Not long after, the rector said gently to Clifford: "And may we really hope for an heir to Wragby? Ah, that would be the hand of God in mercy, indeed!" "Well! We may _hope_," said Clifford, with a faint irony, and at the same time, a certain conviction. He had begun to believe it really possible it might even be _his_ child.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  So there you are. You’re holding a bit of queer history in your hands. But does it still strike a raw nerve today and make it vibrate until you think you can’t stand it any more, and you just have to come? Why, yes, I think it does. Only you can be the final judge of that, of course, but it’s my hope that the twisted plots and carefully drawn characters in these stories can still take readers on a good, hard ride. It has always been important to me to give my readers stories that flow smoothly, so that they aren’t jolted by inconsistencies or bad grammar. I want to create a state of suspended disbelief that allows you to occupy bodies and desires that may be quite foreign to your own. And along the way, I want to sow some interesting seeds of new thoughts about our bodies, why we want the things that we do, what the line is between the permissible and the forbidden, and why the hell we don’t all have better sex lives. If Macho Sluts motivates you to buy a new toy, look for a new trick, or find more pleasure in the equipment and people you already know how to handle, I am satisfied … at least for today. I’ve kept the tranny controversy for the end of this foreword because I believe that any work of literature should stand on its own merits. This book deserves to be judged for its content rather than the shifts in identity that its author has undergone. All I ask is that you give it a chance, despite any reservations you might have, to see if its varied contents don’t spark your libido and make you think. After that, you can read what follows about how Pat Califia became Patrick Califia, and what effect that’s had on the work I produced when I identified, first as a lesbian, and then as a bisexual, woman.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  To their right was a padded, leather-covered horse. On the rack above it gleamed several thin yellow canes. In the middle of the floor was an operating table set up with obstetrical stirrups. The room was so big that a scene could take place simultaneously at each of these stations without tops bumping elbows. Tyre was a little worried about the energy getting dissipated, but she figured if everybody clustered around the action, Roxanne would not be able to see beyond the grim faces of her once and future mistresses. Even though they had been here before, most of them more than once, each of the women wandered off to examine the area she was most interested in using. Tyre was congratulating herself for the way everyone had pulled together when she heard EZ say, “Where did you get a weird name like Joyous Day?” “I guess my mama just loved me,” Joy said contemptuously. “Tyre, where is that little cart with the wheels?” “On the other side of the operating table. Anne-Marie was using it earlier today.” “Let me get it for you,” Anne-Marie said. “Will it interfere with your setting up if I take some practice shots?” Chris asked. “My aim is true.” “Uh-huh, nex’ thing I know you gonna be telling me that Haile Selassie be the Messiah.” “No, mon, everybody knows Elvis Costello is God.” Joy shook her head sadly. “I and I know Jah is dead, only Babylon lives,” she said. “C’mon! If the children of Israel could make the walls of Jericho come tumbling down by clapping their hands and blowing their shofars, I figure anything that makes a lotta noise has got to do some good. I play drums myself.” “I fool around a little with the keyboards. Just for comfort, t’hear another thing talkin’ back at me. Dat thing you got make a fearsome racket, ain’t it so?” “Oh, yeah, yeah. Lemme show you how to throw it. You are going to liiiiike this.” “Jeez, I just can’t handle this serious atmosphere,” EZ whined. “I think somebody put something in the water.” Kay grabbed her by the back of the neck. “Are you gonna pull this shit all night long? ’Cause Mama doesn’t want any badboys usin’ up all the good air in here. You understand me? Now you make yourself useful or you make yourself scarce. Tyre!” “Yo.” “Can we put this pissant in charge of music?” “Um … That tape deck behind the bar is real expensive and real complicated.” “In real life,” said EZ with wounded dignity, “I am a recording engineer.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  It was a blowy day soon after Hilda had gone, that Mrs. Bolton said: "Now why don't you go for a walk through the wood, and look at the daffs behind the keeper's cottage? They're the prettiest sight you'd see in a day's march. And you could put some in your room, wild daffs are always so cheerful-looking, aren't they?" Connie took it in good part, even daffs for daffodils. Wild daffodils! After all, one should not stew in one's own juice. The Spring came back.... "Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn." And the keeper, his thin, white body, like a lonely pistil of an invisible flower! She had forgotten him in her unspeakable depression. But now something roused.... "Pale beyond porch and portal" ... the thing to do was to pass the porches and the portals. She was stronger, she could walk better, and in the wood the wind would not be so tiring as it was across the park, flattening against her. She wanted to forget, to forget the world, and all the dreadful, carrion-bodied people. "Ye must be born again! I believe in the resurrection of the body! Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it shall by no means bring forth. When the crocus cometh forth I too will emerge and see the sun!" In the wind of March endless phrases swept through her consciousness. Little gusts of sunshine blew, strangely bright, and lit up the celandines at the wood's edge, under the hazelrods, they spangled out bright and yellow. And the wood was still, stiller, but yet gusty with crossing sun. The first windflowers were out, and all the wood seemed pale with the pallor of endless little anemones, sprinkling the shaken floor. "The world has grown pale with thy breath." But it was the breath of Persephone, this time; she was out of hell on a cold morning. Cold breaths of wind came, and overhead there was an anger of entangled wind caught among the twigs. It, too, was caught and trying to tear itself free, the wind, like Absalom. How cold the anemones looked, bobbing their naked white shoulders over crinoline skirts of green. But they stood it. A few first bleached little primroses too, by the path, and yellow buds unfolding themselves. The roaring and swaying was overhead, only cold currents came down below. Connie was strangely excited in the wood, and the colour flew in her cheeks, and burned blue in her eyes. She walked ploddingly, picking a few primroses and the first violets, that smelled sweet and cold, sweet and cold. And she drifted on without knowing where she was.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  What a lucky dyke I am, she thought. First I get to star in the most scary porn movie in the world, now I come home and find that my best darling girl is waiting for me, so I won’t have to jerk off before I catch up on my beauty sleep. Fran and I are going to have a little talk later on today, though. Don and I are real good buddies, but I don’t think I told him quite that much about my sexual fantasies. I wonder if I can get his birthdate out of his houseboy the next time Fran and I go over there for brunch. Bet I can if I corner him with a bottle of poppers and pinch his tits off. Why should I be the only one to get a surprise party? The Vampire Purgatory was fairly crowded that night. About sixty men and a score of women had assembled in the tiny club by one o’clock in the morning. Most of the women (other than one who was naked and being led around on a leash) were clad in the high fashion of the bizarre— leather skirts, spike heels, PVC corsets, thigh-high boots, studded wristbands or belts, black latex evening gowns. A handful of scruffy lesbians, dressed like destitute bikers, kept to themselves around a low set of stairs along one wall, covered with carpet and meant to be sat upon. The men (other than a few slumming, well-built leathermen) were in casual, even sloppy street clothes. The mistresses stood by the bar, under track lights, impassive and unapproachable, each one giving out some ominous signal—perhaps toying with a whip around her waist or keeping time to the music with a riding crop in her gloved hand. No one but Teddy, the bartender, spoke to the few expensively attired tourist couples who walked around clinging to one another, wearing fixed, exaggerated smiles which were belied by the tight grip they kept on each other. Solitary male submissives prowled around the dance floor and the two large bondage frames in the corner, up the stairs to the bathroom, down the stairs, toward the back and down the hall which opened into half a dozen tiny cubicles with plywood walls, back to the dance floor and up to the bar, to the well-lit women, and then stood humbly, wistfully, heads down, for long minutes until hope ran out and they moved off again to make another restless circuit of the premises. Occasionally a dominatrix would focus her gaze on a particular man and beckon him forward to kneel, get her a drink, light her cigarette, answer some insulting question, and kneel again.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  toe and smiled. There is just one way,’ he said. ‘There is an extra berth in my cabin, which is usually not available for passengers. But I am prepared to give it to you.’ I thanked him and got the agent to purchase the passage. In April 1893 I set forth full of zest to try my luck in South Africa. The first port of call was Lamu which we reached in about thirteen days. The Captain and I had become great friends by this time. He was fond of playing chess, but as he was quite a novice, he wanted one still more of a beginner for his partner, and so he invited me. I had heard a lot about the game but had never tried my hand at it. Players used to say that this was a game in which there was plenty of scope for the exercise of one’s intelligence. The Captain offered to give me lessons, and he found me a good pupil as I had unlimited patience. Every time I was the loser, and that made him all the more eager to teach me. I liked the game, but never carried my liking beyond the boat or my knowledge beyond the moves of the pieces. At Lamu the ship remained at anchor for some three to four hours, and I landed to see the port. The Captain had also gone ashore, but he had warned me that the harbour was treacherous and that I should return in good time. It was a very small place. I went to the Post Office and was delighted to see the Indian clerks there, and had a talk with them. I also saw the Africans and tried to acquaint myself with their ways of life which interested me very much. This took up some time. There were some deck passengers with whom I had made acquaintance, and who had landed with a view to cooking their food on shore and having a quiet meal. I now found them preparing to return to the steamer, so we all got into the same boat. The tide was high in the harbour and our boat had more than its proper load. The current was so strong that it was impossible to hold the boat to the

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  Suddenly Sonoko stopped to retie a shoelace. She seemed to be taking a curiously long time about it, so I walked on to the gate and waited, looking out at the street. I did not yet realize that she had wanted me to walk on a little ahead of her and had employed this charming technique of an eighteen-year-old girl for just that purpose. Suddenly, from behind me, her hand plucked at the sleeve of my uniform. The shock I felt was like being hit by an automobile while walking along absentmindedly. ".. . Please . . . this . ." The corner of a stiff foreign-style envelope touched my palm. I closed my hand upon it so quickly that I all but crushed it, just as one might strangle a baby bird. Somehow I could not believe my senses as I felt the weight of the envelope in my hand. But there it was, an envelope of the kind favored by schoolgirls, held tightly in my own hand; I blinked at it as though it were something a person ought not to look at. "Not now—read it after you're home," she whispered in a voice that was small and choking, as though she had been tickled. "Where shall I send a reply?" I asked. "I wrote it—it's inside—the address in N Village. Write me there?'It is an amusing thing, but suddenly, parting became a delight for me. It was like the pleasure of that moment in a game of hide-and-seek when the person who is "it" counts and everyone runs to hide, each in the direction that pleases him. I had an odd ability to enjoy everything in this way. Because of this perverse talent my cowardice was often mistaken, even in my own eyes, for courage. We parted at the ticket gate of the station, not even shaking hands. I was in ecstasy over having received the first love letter of my life. I could not wait until I was home to read it, and I opened the envelope there in the elevated car, heedless of all eyes. As I did so the contents all but spilled out. There were several silhouette-cards and a sheaf of those imported colored postcards that seem to be the delight of mission-school students. Among them was a doublefold of blue notepaper, decorated with a Disney cartoon of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. Under the cartoon her note was written in neat characters that smacked of painstaking penmanship: "I was truly overwhelmed with gratitude for your kindness in lending me the books. Thanks to you, I have been able to read them with very profound interest. I pray with all my heart that you will be well even during the air raids.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  One afternoon your mother and I took you to visit a preschool. Our host took us down to a large gym filled with a bubbling ethnic stew of New York children. The children were running, jumping, and tumbling. You took one look at them, tore away from us, and ran right into the scrum. You have never been afraid of people, of rejection, and I have always admired you for this and always been afraid for you because of this. I watched you leap and laugh with these children you barely knew, and the wall rose in me and I felt I should grab you by the arm, pull you back and say, “We don’t know these folks! Be cool!” I did not do this. I was growing, and if I could not name my anguish precisely I still knew that there was nothing noble in it. But now I understand the gravity of what I was proposing—that a four-year-old child be watchful, prudent, and shrewd, that I curtail your happiness, that you submit to a loss of time. And now when I measure this fear against the boldness that the masters of the galaxy imparted to their own children, I am ashamed. — New York was another spectrum unto itself, and the great diversity I’d seen at Howard, solely among black people, now spread across a metropolis. Something different awaited around every corner. Here there were African drummers assembling in Union Square. Here there were dead office towers, brought to life at night by restaurants buried within that served small kegs of beer and Korean fried chicken. Here there were black girls with white boys, and black boys with Chinese-American girls, and Chinese-American girls with Dominican boys, and Dominican boys with Jamaican boys and every other imaginable combination. I would walk through the West Village, marveling at restaurants the size of living rooms, and I could see that the very smallness of these restaurants awarded the patrons a kind of erudite cool, as though they were laughing at a joke, and it would take the rest of the world a decade to catch on. Summer was unreal—whole swaths of the city became fashion shows, and the avenues were nothing but runways for the youth. There was a heat unlike anything I’d ever felt, a heat from the great buildings, compounded by the millions of people jamming themselves into subway cars, into bars, into those same tiny eateries and cafés. I had never seen so much life. And I had never imagined that such life could exist in so much variety. It was everyone’s particular Mecca, packed into one singular city.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Instead, she wound up listening to her driver describe her conquest of Sara. Tyre opened her own door, slammed it, stomped into the house, took off her clothes, laid down on the front hall carpet and masturbated, then went upstairs, changed into her leathers without bothering to take a shower first, and went out to hunt for the wolf-pack of women who would help Alex decide if Roxanne belonged to her or on the streets. Tyre didn’t hear from Alex for three weeks. Out of spite more than anything else, she instituted a once-a-week festival of gay male porn films and was surprised and disappointed when it filled up the house. “No accounting for taste,” she told Georgia, who gave her a strange look and said, “What’s good taste got to do with the price of ben-wa balls in Hong Kong, boss? You need a vacation or a new hat or something?” She thought yeah, I need something, but couldn’t quite figure out what it was until one day the phone rang just as she was about to dump out a mug of cold tea and leave the office. “Tyre? Alex.” Two words, and the edge on that voice ran up and down her spine. Old butterflies came back to life in Tyre’s stomach. “Yes?” The word came out in a whoosh. She was suddenly out of breath. “Things moved along any since I last saw you?” “Well, as a matter of fact, yes.” Tyre smiled at her reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall. She had done a good job with this, she had a right to be a little proud. “We can run that trip for you any time you like.” Alex whistled. “That was fast. Can I get a thumbnail sketch of your crew?” “I know you said you didn’t want anyone there who Roxanne knows. But Anne-Marie has asked for permission to join us. She says she would like to help give Roxanne a going-away party to remember.” “Mmm. I just thought the presence of strangers would make it much more intense. Isn’t Anne-Marie into all that frilly Victorian stuff? The evening I envisioned was more, uh, heavy metal.” “Anne-Marie’s specialty is caning. If anything, Roxanne’s prior experience with her will make her more intimidating, not less. She is also a lady, and a real lady is appropriate in any circumstances. I think she will be an asset. And she promised me she would leave her corsets at home.” “I trust your judgment. You’re the madam.” There was no hint of irony in Alex’s voice. Were they both going to pretend they had never lost their tempers with one another? Well, maybe that was the best strategy. Tyre took a deep breath and went on. “Then there’s Joyous Day, the photographer. You know her? She had a show at Quotidian Gallery last month.” “Yeah, we went to see her stuff. So she does more than take pictures of it, huh?” “Oh, yes.”

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Tyre knew that one of Michael’s favorite things was a blowjob from someone who was being worked over. She smiled and shook her head when her chauffeur, who really was an ex-Marine, climbed up on the table and forced Roxanne to lift her head and watch her unzip her fly. Michael and Anne-Marie were also old friends, and the nurse shot Tyre a look of delight. “Don’t think you got enough of this Marine Corps meat,” Michael said, and shoved it down her throat just as the first stroke of the cane landed in the crack between Roxanne’s buttock and upper thigh. Alex winced, but Roxanne held steady, her head bobbing up and down Michael’s cock, as the characteristic double-weal came up, livid on her fair skin. Anne-Marie bided her time. Tyre walked over to Michael, unbuttoned the high-necked, dark-blue tunic with narrow red piping and began working on her nipples with her sharp nails. Her cruelty was passed on to Roxanne, who found herself choking on the energetic cock in her throat, and Anne-Marie chose just that moment to strike her again. “Alex,” said Joy, putting a hand on her shoulder, “you are not used to lookin’ at this from the outside. So tell me, do you like it?” “I—” “You mus’ remember how good it make you feel to whip her yourself, I think. How good it feels in the muscles of your arm and here.” Joy put a hand between her breasts. “Your heart is poundin’ and poundin’ like a drumhead that’s gonna split. Feel yourself.” She took Alex’s hand and put it on top of her codpiece. “Come on, girl, half the women here playin’ with themselves. Check out your stuff. She gonna hit her soon again I think—yes. You feel your clit jump? Oh, yeah, this is good for you and for her. She like it so much, Alex, see how still she hold herself out of pride for you? That’s a beautiful ass she got. I mus’ say I want another handful of that girl of yours all t’myself.” Joy chuckled and mock-punched Alex on the point of her chin. “You seriously twisted girl, I like that ver’ much, just don’t try to straighten out now, or you break.” Kay was hauling EZ, who had gone AWOL to the bar, back into the circle by her ear. “You got eight hours of music set up at the very least,” she said. “We don’t need you providin’ a sound track for the rest of the fucking decade. Now park your butt here and watch this action with me or go play on the freeway.” She smacked her ass, then slid her hand into EZ’s back pocket. “I thought you said girls just played around with this shit. So far I’m in no danger of fallin’ asleep. Whyncha just admit you don’t know what the fuck you were talkin’ about? Or do you maybe like boys better’n girls after all, dipshit?” “Kiss my ass,” EZ hissed.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Shall I bring it out a little more? So we can tell?” She twisted the nipple a quarter-turn, crushed it. Alex grinned at her and judiciously applied exactly the same amount of pressure to the teat she held, then twisted it past that point. “Gonna tell me you don’t sweat, you glow?” she asked Tyre. “Looks like sweat to me. Looks good on you, like maybe you’re working hard for a change.” “I don’t mind working hard, and I don’t think you mind my being hard on you. You like this,” Tyre accused her, getting a grip on the other nipple and stretching them both out, until Alex saw tiny white stars. “I like this ,” Alex affirmed, and returned the hurt worse, until their hips slid past each other and their thighs interlocked, the long bone of the leg and the muscle over it pressed into the other woman’s mound, pushing the sensitive, swollen tissue back down until it flattened against the pubic bone. Hard and soft, hard and soft, their hands played on each other’s bodies, and they rocked in each other’s arms, seeking advantage, grappling. It was a kind of wrestling with no attempt to throw, but a quest for domination nonetheless. They both yelped at the same moment, but not from the pain of well-manipulated nipples. Their thighs separated momentarily, startled by the intensity of this pleasure, and its brevity. They groped for each other’s crotches. The sound of Tyre’s zipper was a long, continuous wail punctuated with a few sharp snaps as Alex’s studded crotch-piece was pulled off and dropped on the floor. “You’re wet,” Alex said. “Thirsty?” Tyre spit. “Empty, too,” Alex said, and fixed that. But Tyre had already thrust home between her legs, and they were both wet to the wrist. “You can’t keep that up,” Tyre said, fucking her, “you can’t keep it up while you—” “While I make you come? Is that what you were gonna say? Because it’s not gonna take me that long to—” “Lose it, give it up, you can’t help it—” “But I can help you, help you over the edge. Tell me you don’t want it.” Tyre’s entire free hand fell onto Alex’s breast and squeezed it, hard. “Show me how tough you are,” she hissed, “big leather stud, such a goddamn big girl, can you take it, can you?” They could not get away from each other, could barely keep on their feet. As Alex retaliated by flicking Tyre’s nipples, their mouths met and they swallowed the noise of a mutual surrender, predatory but also protective.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  Seven years after I saw the pictures of those doors, I received my first adult passport. I wish I had come to it sooner. I wish, when I was back in that French class, that I had connected the conjugations, verbs, and gendered nouns to something grander. I wish someone had told me what that class really was—a gate to some other blue world. I wanted to see that world myself, to see the doors and everything behind them. The day of my departure, I sat in a restaurant with your mother, who’d shown me so much. I told her, “I am afraid.” I didn’t really speak the language. I did not know the customs. I would be alone. She just listened and held my hand. And that night, I boarded a starship. The starship punched out into the dark, punched through the sky, punched out past West Baltimore, punched out past The Mecca, past New York, past any language and every spectrum known to me. My ticket took me to Geneva first. Everything happened very fast. I had to change money. I needed to find a train from the airport into the city and after that find another train to Paris. Some months earlier, I had begun a halting study of the French language. Now I was in a storm of French, drenched really, and only equipped to catch drops of the language—“who,” “euros,” “you,” “to the right.” I was still very afraid. I surveyed the railway schedule and became aware that I was one wrong ticket from Vienna, Milan, or some Alpine village that no one I knew had ever heard of. It happened right then. The realization of being far gone, the fear, the unknowable possibilities, all of it—the horror, the wonder, the joy—fused into an erotic thrill. The thrill was not wholly alien. It was close to the wave that came over me in Moorland. It was kin to the narcotic shot I’d gotten watching the people with their wineglasses spill out onto West Broadway. It was all that I’d felt looking at those Parisian doors. And at that moment I realized that those changes, with all their agony, awkwardness, and confusion, were the defining fact of my life, and for the first time I knew not only that I really was alive, that I really was studying and observing, but that I had long been alive—even back in Baltimore. I had always been alive. I was always translating.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  What time should I bring her by?” “Why don’t I send my driver, Michael, around for you at nine o’clock? Put Roxanne in a hood and manacles. If you like, I’ve got a mummy bag you can zip her into. Or you can just throw a cloak around her and stuff her into the back seat of the limo. Michael will give you enough lead time to get here on your bike. That way, Roxanne won’t know where she’s going or whether or not you are going with her. When Michael arrives, she can call me on the car phone. There’s a back entrance to the basement so we won’t have to carry her in through the main floor. The disco bunnies would pass out en masse.” “Aw, c’mon. It would be so good for them.” “Look, they have a right to their own version of a good time. Leather and vanilla don’t mix real well. I’m not very fond of 69 myself—“ “Yeah?” Alex said dryly. “Except in the context of dominance and submission, you bitch, and if I was about to come in my girlfriend’s sweet little mouth, I wouldn’t want to be interrupted by a series of harrowing screams or the sound of a belt hitting a bare butt. Look, don’t worry, this is going to be notorious, all right? The rumors are already circulating. We’re going to have to post Simba at the head of the stairs with a cattle prod to keep the voyeurs from using a battering ram on the dungeon door.” “The first weekend of next month, huh? How am I going to keep myself busy in between now and then?” “Well, I know what I’m going to be doing. I’m going to be taking each of the dominatrices on a tour of the dungeon we’ll be using, showing them how all the bondage equipment works. It wouldn’t hurt for you to get more familiar with the premises, either.” Alex’s voice went shy. “Oh. Yeah. Well, I been already. Last weekend. You, uh, you weren’t there I don’t think. So you wouldn’t know. That I was there. You know?” “Oh, ah, no, I didn’t, shit, um, know you were here. Well, god-dammit, why didn’t you tell me? I would have brought you down some champagne.” “For some reason the security guards didn’t seem to be too fond of me, and I didn’t think any of them would do me the favor of taking you a personal message.” “Oh. Of course not. Damn. Well, I guess I’ll see you for sure anyway the first weekend of—” “Next month. Yeah. Story of my life. But be still my heart, it should be a good one. Get lotsa beauty sleep.” “I promise.”

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  As a founding member of Samois, the first lesbian s/m support group, a columnist for the Advocate , and probably the best known sado-masochist in the world, Califia is known for being on the leading edge of lesbian erotica, and this book lives up to her reputation as a sex pioneer. Macho Sluts will undoubtably shock some and mesmerize others. As Califia says in her introduction, “When you are dealing with an area as permeated with ignorance and superstition as sexuality, it is more important to be honest than it is to be correct.” The eight stories in the book date from “Jessie,” 1977, to the newest, “The Spoiler,” from 1985. The latter is one of two stories which introduce male sexual actors. Califia argues well that lesbians should be able to write about and use men, gay or straight, in their erotic writing. “Jessie,” the notorious first chapter, has been a dyke j/o favorite since it first appeared in Coming to Power . The story is as hot as ever, and only adds to the unpredictability of the book as a whole. Aficionados of classic, old-fashioned B&D will swoon over “Finishing School,” an elegant tale of training, torture, and reward. The ending is a shocker: the first, but not the last, point in Macho Sluts where the reader gasps, “Oh my god, I can’t get turned on by this!” “The Calyx of Isis,” the book’s only major disappointment, is a dense story of tag-team s/m set in a mythical San Francisco women’s bathhouse. The story trots the reader through a varied s/m repertoire which leaves one exhausted rather than aroused by the end. Perhaps in smaller doses, divided into chapters, one for each set of the story’s dominatrices, “Calyx” would be a little easier to swallow. However, there is something for just about everyone: whipping, fisting, (genital and anal), piercing, heavy bondage, dyke cocksucking, and lots of sensimilla, sushi, and sake. Throughout Macho Sluts , Califia challenges dykes who write pornography, dykes who hate pornography, and everyone in between. “The Hustler” is a profoundly cynical but funny tale of a woman-dominated future in which expressions of sex are piously regulated. The outlawed individual (the Hustler) is oppressed by the “cud-chewing” (boring) majority. This is Califia’s revenge on the Dworkinite forces in the women’s movement. “The Hustler” will definitely piss off a lot of radical feminists, but then, they probably wouldn’t have gotten this far in the book anyhow. If any radical feminist were to read this far, she’d run screaming for the nearest copy of Gyn/Ecology by the time she got two pages into “The Surprise Party.” Califia lets fly with a right-on-target challenge to the idea that lesbian sexual fantasies should only have women characters. This story is not easy to read, and whatever a reader feels at the end, she will not be bored. Disgusted, maybe, turned-on, maybe—or fascinated, horrified, angry, or amused. Read this story.