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 The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  1001. “Judging by the terminal figure,” I remarked, “Fatface is already here.” “Your humor,” said Lo, “is sidesplitting, deah fahther.” We were in sage-brush country by that time, and there was a day or two of lovely release (I had been a fool, all was well, that discomfort was merely a trapped flatus), and presently the mesas gave way to real mountains, and, on time, we drove into Wace. Oh, disaster. Some confusion had occurred, she had misread a date in the Tour Book, and the Magic Cave ceremonies were over! She took it bravely, I must admit—and, when we discovered there was in kurortish Wace a summer theatre in full swing, we naturally drifted toward it one fair mid-June evening. I really could not tell you the plot of the play we saw. A trivial affair, no doubt, with self-conscious light effects and a mediocre leading lady. The only detail that pleased me was a garland of seven little graces, more or less immobile, prettily painted, barelimbed—seven bemused pubescent girls in colored gauze that had been recruited locally (judging by the partisan flurry here and there among the audience) and were supposed to represent a living rainbow, which lingered throughout the last act, and rather teasingly faded behind a series of multiplied veils. I remember thinking that this idea of children-colors had been lifted by authors Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage in James Joyce, and that two of the colors were quite exasperatingly lovely— Orange who kept fidgeting all the time, and Emerald who, when her eyes got used to the pitch-black pit where we all heavily sat, suddenly smiled at her mother or her protector. As soon as the thing was over, and manual applause—a sound my nerves cannot stand—began to crash all around me, I started to pull and push Lo toward the exit, in my so natural amorous impatience to get her back to our neon-blue cottage in the stunned, starry night: I always say nature is stunned by the sights she sees. Dolly-Lo, however, lagged behind, in a rosy daze, her pleased eyes narrowed, her sense of vision swamping the rest of her senses to such an extent that her limp hands hardly came together at all in the mechanical action of clapping they still went through. I had seen that kind of thing in children before but, by God, this was a special child, myopically beaming at the already remote stage where I glimpsed something of the joint authors—a man’s tuxedo and the bare shoulders of a hawklike, black-haired, strikingly tall woman. “You’ve again hurt my wrist, you brute,” said Lolita in a small voice as she slipped into her car seat. “I am dreadfully sorry, my darling, my own ultraviolet darling,” I said, unsuccessfully trying to catch her elbow, and I added, to change the conversation—to change the direction of fate, oh God, oh God: “Vivian is quite a woman.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  With as much defiance as honesty I say: The world of streethustling holds great power over me, and the others in it, a world we love; I've experienced it-survived it—for years—much longer, I'm proud to say, than most. It's a world clouded in generalities. Hustling is one of those activities that has to be experienced first-hand to be fully understood; sociology doesn't work. The first man who picked me up while I was hustling—the very day I arrived in New York—approached me with these words: “I'll give you ten and I don't give a damn for you.” That was a good street price at that time. His words— and, as it turned out, he did give a damn; a very moving, tough man—opened up a world of sexual power through being paid, and they took me to streets in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas—even, to smash my sheltered childhood, in El Paso, my hometown, where I was picked up by a junior-high teacher of mine, who didn't recognize me. Even when I had good jobs, I was on the streets recurrently, pulled back as if by a powerful lover. Even when City of Night was riding the best-seller lists. I've seen copies of my books in the houses of people who have picked me up anonymously. At times just the offer of sexmoney is enough. Those times I don't need, actually, to go with anyone. There is a terrific, terrible excitement in getting paid by another man for sex. A great psychological release, a feeling that this is where real sexual power lies—not only to be desired by one's own sex but to be paid for being desired, and if one chooses that strict role, not to reciprocate in those encounters, a feeling of emotional detachment as freedom—these are some of the lures; lures implicitly acknowledged as desirable by the very special place the malehustler occupies in the gay world, entirely different from that of the female prostitute in the straight. Even when he is disdained by those who would never pay for sex, he is still an object of admiration to most, at times an object of jealousy. To “look like a hustler” in gay jargon is to look very, very good. One of the myths of the hustler is that he is actually looking for love. Perhaps, under the surface, deeply. On the surface there is too often contempt for the client, yes, at best pity—sometimes, seldom and at times only fleetingly, affection; yes, I have felt that. The client, too, at times resents the hustler because he desires him.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Despite our apparent reliance on elaborate speech, many of our most important exchanges occur simply through the “unspoken voice” of our body’s expressions in the dance of life. The deciphering of this nonverbal realm is a foundation of the healing approach that I present in this book. To convey the nature and transmutation of trauma in the body, brain and psyche, I have also drawn upon selected findings in the neurosciences. It is my conviction that clinical, naturalistic animal studies and comparative brain research can together greatly contribute to the evolution of methodologies that help restore resilience and promote self-healing. Toward this end, I will explain how our nervous system has evolved a hierarchical structure, how these hierarchies interact, and how the more advanced systems shut down in the face of overwhelming threat, leaving brain, body and psyche to their more archaic functions. I hope to demonstrate how successful therapy restores these systems to their balanced operation. An unexpected side effect of this approach is what might be called “Awakening the Living, Knowing Body.” I will discuss how this awakening describes, in essence, what happens when animal instinct and reason are brought together, giving us the opportunity to become more whole human beings. I aim to speak to the therapists who seek a better understanding of the roots of trauma in brain and body—such as psychological, psychiatric, physical, occupational and “bodywork” therapists. I also hope to reach the many medical doctors who are confounded by patients presenting inexplicable and mutable symptoms, the nurses who have long worked on the frontlines caring for terrified, injured patients and the policy makers concerned with our nation’s problematic healthcare. Finally, I look for the larger audience of voracious readers of a wide variety of subjects—ranging from adventure, anthropology, biology, Darwin, neuroscience, quantum physics, string theory, relativity and zoology to the “Science” section of the New York Times . Inspired by a childhood of reading Sherlock Holmes, I have attempted to engage the reader in the excitement of a lifelong journey of mystery and discovery. This voyage has carried me into a field that is at the core of what it means to be a human being, existing on an unpredictable and oftentimes violent planet. I have been privileged to study how people can rebound after extreme challenges and have borne witness to the resilience of the human spirit, to the lives of countless people who have returned to happiness and goodness, even after great devastation. I will be telling some of this story in a way that is personal. The writing of this book has presented me with a very exciting challenge.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Wow … wow … wow! A Personal Pilgrimage When I first encountered the ideas of Yakovlev, I registered the truth of his hypothesis viscerally. My gut rumbled in recognition; my emotions soared in excitement. And intellectually, I yearned to digest and savor the exquisite essence of this man’s genius. † I wanted to devour him alive—that is, if he was still alive. It took several days of persistent phone calls to locate him. He was indeed alive and well. This coming-of-age odyssey mutated to locating and meeting with some of my other key intellectual heroes. After finally receiving my doctorate from University of California–Berkeley in 1977, I sent copies of my thesis on stress to several scientists who were my intellectual mentors. This list included Nikolaas Tinbergen, Raymond Dart, Carl Richter, Hans Selye, Ernst Gellhorn, Paul MacLean and Yakovlev himself. I was on my way … Yakovlev’s lab was in the basement of a dark cavernous building belonging (I believe) to the National Institutes of Health. I proceeded toward the door described to me by the receptionist. It was ever so slightly ajar. As I poked my head in, I was startled by the panoramic vision of shelf after shelf filled with bottles of pickled brains. An impish figure called out, motioning me to his desk. This octogenarian of small stature had a quiet and gentle presence belying his truly expansive character. With twinkling blue eyes and genuine enthusiasm, Yakovlev warmly invited me to sit down. He proceeded to ask me about my interests and was curious why I might have chosen to come so far to visit him. When I told him about my interest in instincts and about my ideas concerning mind-body healing, stress and self-regulation, he jumped up, grabbed my arm excitedly and took me from jar to jar sharing with me his vast variety of specimens, demonstrating the basic anatomical building blocks of the brain. From there he led me back to his desk and microscope; together we looked at slides of minutely thin slices of brain tissue. He narrated this viewing, waxing lyrical in his elaborate reasoning, as I imagined Darwin might have done in his laboratory a mere hundred or so years earlier. For me, the thrill was so intense that I felt as though I could not contain my pressing urge to jump up and shout, “Yes!” I knew that I was on the right track, that we truly are, to the last of our neurons, just a bunch of animals—and that’s really not so bad. At one o’clock, after sharing an egg salad sandwich, Yakovlev drew me an intricate map to guide me to my next appointment, which was about forty miles into the Maryland countryside. He did this task in anatomical detail, meticulously employing a set of brightly colored pencils and dissecting, with exacting precision, the best route and its distinguishing landmarks.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Toward the front of the theater and to the left, Jim notices, there is a concentration of forms for these minutes That signals activity; the few men who came to see the movie sit far apart from each other, deliberately isolated. Propping his feet on the row before him, Jim sits toward the left-front of the theater in the circle of hunters, but still enough apart that it is he who will be approached. He glances cursorily at the movie, where a man leaning over a motorcycle is getting fucked with a huge dildo …. A tall figure approaches Jim, but instead of sitting next to him, he sits directly in front so that Jim's boots are virtually on the man's shoulders. Turning his head, the tall man licks Jim's boots, hands drawing them closer to his head. Instantly, Jim feels the powerful rush of wayward excitement triggered disturbingly; the excitement aroused by another's total submission, implied. The man's tongue laps at the boots. Jim removes his feet from the back seat. The man slides down on the floor, and through a break in the rows of seats, like decaying teeth in the dark mouth, he crawls along the floor. His tongue bathes Jim's boots. One of the man's hands tries to raise one of the boots over his own groin. But Jim shifts his body on the seat. Now the man's tongue rises up on denim, to Jim's groin. The unwelcome excitement growing, Jim presses the other's head down—harder, harshly now. The other's teeth gnaw at the belt. Jim pushes the searching mouth roughly against his groin, forcing his cock in the others' throat, holding it there until the man gags; the man's hands grope Jim's boots, fingers sliding under the soles. Glancing up again at the movie, to look away from the submitting cowering form squeezed before him, Jim sees a man dressed totally in leather flagellating a naked man tied at the wrists and feet. Immediately, Jim breaks this disturbing contact with the groveling man. Stifling the strong excitement, he moves to the back aisle. The handsome man he sat next to earlier is being sucked by another. Jim moves to the other side of the theater. A youngman with the back of his pants slit open is being fucked. On the screen the leathered man is burying his boot into the other's naked groin. Feeling an aroused agitation, Jim leaves the theater. He takes off his sweaty shirt. The man who licked his boots has followed him out. Jim walks hurriedly away from him. 6:06 P.M. The Afternoon and Early-Evening Bar. Another Bar. The Turf Bar. A bar in West Hollywood thrives on Sunday afternoons and into early evening.

• From Escape (2007)

  We kept badgering Mother to let us go back to our cousins’ house. We had so much more freedom there to play and explore. In our own home, we were forbidden to play outside unless someone was watching. Mother finally agreed to let us go on a mountain hike with our cousins. When we got to their house they were still making lunches. My cousin Shannon was making sandwiches out of fried potatoes. It looked like food we called “yuck yuck.” Shannon said it was something her mother had taught her to make when there was nothing else to eat in the house. There was great discussion about where to go for a hike. No one wanted to go to the predictable places. We all wanted to go to the place that was off-limits—the ghost mountain, where some said the Gadianton robbers were buried. They were the wicked robbers who hurt the people of God in the Book of Mormon. We’d been taught that God had the power to change the entire earth at a moment’s notice. Uncle Roy used the Grand Canyon as an example of the intensity of God’s power. He said God created it on a day when he’d been extremely angry. The wicked city inhabited by the Gadianton robbers had been buried under the mountain in an instant of God’s wrath. God just picked up a mountain over in the Pine Valley area and dropped it on top of the evil city. There were several people in the community who claimed they knew that the mountain was haunted because several evil men had taken a very good man in the community up to the mountain. The mountain was opened up enough for him to see that the city inside was bursting with gold and precious jewels. He was told that if he killed Uncle Roy, the prophet of God, then he would be given all of the gold and treasure buried in the mountain. He refused and the mountain was sealed up again. My cousins said that their father was a man of God who had a lot of bills and debts. If we could find the gold buried in the mountain, it would be a huge help to him. We decided to take shovels and give it our best shot. We knew we weren’t supposed to hike on the haunted mountain, but now that it had been turned into a noble cause, no one felt terribly disobedient.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  Steve looked down at the boy’s long, muscular back; at his dark, curly hair damp with sweat and felt his power return. He pushed in and out and felt the exquisite strain in his legs, pushing him toward exhaustion. Jason looked over his shoulder and their eyes locked. Jason’s pupils were huge, nearly overwhelming the chocolate-brown irises. His eyes were so open and resolute that Steve let them pull him into the next age. He transformed in that instant, taking on a part he had forcefully resisted, transforming irrevocably from youth to middle age, from aging twink to youngish Daddy. He felt strong and hot and alive. He plunged his cock deep into the boy and let out a moan that became a shout, increasing in volume with each wild thrust. And Jason’s shout joined his until they were both making a deafening, wordless noise that pushed them past the breathless moment in which they spewed out their seed and collapsed. And then there was silence. And then, as they regained themselves, the silence was slowly repopulated by the sounds of their breathing, the ticking of the desk clock, the sounds of the street outside and the hum of the refrigerator in the corner. They lay in a sweaty tangle on the sofa, Steve crumpled on top of Jason, both of them smeared with cum and lube and trickling sweat. Jason’s breathing was slow and rhythmic beneath him, his eyes closed and a tender smile etched on his beautiful features. Steve looked at the pale boy whose body was entangled with his own and smiled. When Jason left, Steve stayed behind. He mopped up the mess with his damp running shorts and changed into a clean pair, watching the natural light drain from his office, leaving everything long and shadowy and indistinct. He sat back in his chair with his bare feet propped on the desk and crossed at the ankle. He held the business card on which Jason had scrawled his email address and cell phone number, and smiled to himself. When the light had faded completely, Steve tugged on his socks and shoes, clicked off the Tiffany lamp and left. Distant heat lightning illuminated the dark, starless sky with silent flashes. He walked slowly back to his car thinking about Jason, with his finely mounded ass, his startling directness, the hungry, open look in his eyes—and his lust for an older man. He thought about Penny, with her cold hands, her vague accusations and the hard, empty look in her eyes. He felt different somehow, like a longtime combatant who had finally negotiated a peace. And he smiled again. When he got back to the car he found a neatly folded note on his windshield. When he unfolded it, a ring—the wide silver band with a pattern of interlocking circles—fell into his open palm. He stared at the ring and then read the note.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  “Yes, yes”—I could hear my voice rising higher and higher; somehow I had to convey the excitement of my prospects—“she’s only a freshman but she goes out with college boys and everything and she’s been to Europe and she’s—well, the other girls say top-heavy but only from sour grapes. And she’s the leader of the Crowd or could be if she cared and didn’t have such a reputation.” My mother was intent upon her sewing. She was dressed to go out and this, yes, it must be a rip in the seam of her raincoat; once she’d fixed it she’d be on her way. “Wonderful, dear.” “But isn’t it exciting?” I insisted. “Well, yes, but I hope she’s not too fast.” “For me?” “For anyone. In general. There, now.” My mother bit the thread off, her eyes suddenly as wide and empty and intelligent as a cat’s. She stood, examined her handiwork, put the coat on, moved to the door, backtracked, lifted her cheek toward me to peck. “I hope you have fun. You seem terribly nervous. Just look at your hands. You’re wringing them—never saw anyone literally wring his hands before.” “Well, it’s terribly exciting,” I said in wild despair. My sister wasn’t home, so I was alone once my mother had gone—alone to take my second bath of the day in the mean, withholding afternoon light permeating the frosted glass window and to listen to the listless hum of traffic outside, in such contrast to my heart’s anticipation. It was as though the very intensity of my feeling had drained the surroundings of significance. I was the unique center of consciousness, its toxic concentration. I was going out on a date with Helen Paper and I had to calm myself by then because the evening would surely be quicksilver small talk and ten different kinds of smile and there would be hands linking and parting as in a square dance you had to be very subtle to hear called, subtle and calm. I wanted so badly to be popular, to have the others look back as I ran to catch up, then to walk with my left hand around his waist, the right around hers, her long hair blown back on my shoulder, pooling there for a moment in festive intimacy, a sort of gold epaulet of the secret order of joy.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Somehow I was picking up the sound of sex. I was always on the alert for it, I studied boys as they came out of one another’s dorm rooms, I lounged on other guys’ beds during free time, always in expectation of a held glance, a missed beat, but I never heard a single hint. Now I was hearing something—tentative to be sure, but something real. “These jazz guys?” I said as I struck the final chord. “Yes?” “Some of them are oddballs, right? No offense, Mr. Beattie. I mean, the jazz world’s pretty progressive, right?” “Yeah. We say hip.” “Is this Bugs hip?” “How do you mean, exactly?” I smiled. The clock hands refused to move. “No, how do you mean?” Beattie repeated. He was also smiling. “Well, I was just wondering why you were putting him up in the parents’ suite instead of at your own house with your wife and kids.” Mr. Beattie’s eyes widened rhetorically; he wanted me to see them widening. “Boy,” he said, shaking his head, “you’re wild.” He covered the next beat by miming playing a saxophone. His fingers ran up and down imaginary keys and his cheeks swelled. He closed his eyes and rocked back on his heels. “Seriously,” I said, breathless and exhilarated but only in my capacity as spectator; as a performer I was beautifully calm. “Chuck says that marijuana—” “Sh-h-h!” Mr. Beattie hissed. “Don’t go talking that shit. That’s real bogue, man.” “Sorry,” I said, “Mr. Beattie.” “So what did you want to know?” His smile had migrated back and now he was wailing one more long note on his imaginary sax. “I just wanted to know if it’s good for sex.” “Is it—? Well, yeah.” He laughed. “Yeah. I had you pegged all wrong. I thought you were the Little Lord Fauntleroy type, but you’re hip. I like the way you just truck right in.” He mimed driving a truck. He took a swerve, then pressed down on the brake, glided to a halt, switched off the key, pulled it out, twirled it once and pocketed it. “Just as neat and simple as you please.” Very deliberate, now: “Yeah, kid, it’s great for sex. Next question.” I played a C-major scale. “Are you going to make me do all the work in this conversation?” “Possibly.” He grabbed his crotch, then looked down at his white hand, the white of cooked ham, gave it an extra shake and, as though satisfied with his test, smiled. “You’re a good kid,” he said, releasing himself. I could hear the football team shouting as the guys entered the athletics building next door; that must be the thunder of their cleats on the stone floor just inside the double doors. “Say you and Bugs are listening to music or something and you’re all alone in the parents’ suite and nobody’s around, because it is real isolated after all, and say you smoke some—” “We get high. So go on.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Chuck was famous for his escapades. He’d regale me for hours with the details. His current girl was the pert granddaughter of an almost comically conservative senator, one of those mastodons my father voted for. At the moment Janie had her own house, an unusual possession for a girl of seventeen. Her mother, who was supposed to live with her, was off sailing the Aegean with an Argentine. Her playboy father, about to divorce his third wife and already separated from her, lived on a neighboring estate by himself. He’d lost his license after repeated arrests for drunk driving, and his daughter had to chauffeur him everywhere. They looked like brother and sister. A maid cooked and cleaned for Janie, but the maid didn’t live in. Someone else maintained the indoor pool. At night Janie was alone and she was free to invite anyone she liked to stay over. That would usually be Chuck on weekends. Even on some weeknights Chuck would escape the dorm after lights-out. Janie would be waiting for him at the gate in her battered old MG, lights off. She’d return him to school before dawn. In the interval he’d persuade her to perform some new sexual stunt. They’d experiment with exotic lubricants (papaya juice, chocolate syrup, cold bacon grease). He’d insert a balloon in her and then inflate it. Eventually she would return the favor as they both drifted on an air mattress across the heated swimming pool on a sub-zero December night. Snow blew up in banks against the thick glass doors and spun in minor swirls under the porch lights. Farther up the hill stood pines laden with snow like ermined dons gathering for the procession. Chuck grew more boisterous, reckless, impatient after every adventure. No outrage was enough for him. Only a war would have been equal to his hunger for danger. He and several members of the Butt Club became friends with Beattie. Just before supper every other afternoon they’d sit around with him down in the music building and smoke cigarettes in one of the record-listening booths. They’d spin jazz records. Sometimes Beattie would play along on his own drums. The noise of their talk, laughter and drumming was confined to the soundproof room. Whoever might report they were smoking off limits and at an impermissible time of day could be spotted at a safe distance through the glass window set into the wall separating the booth from the glee club’s big practice room.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  When I was seven my mother divorced my father. My sister and I, aroused by the declamatory tone of the grownups downstairs, sat in pajamas on the front stairs and listened to the speeches. How odd and thrilling that where we’d live and go to school could be decided in this manner. My father, my mother and the woman who’d eventually be my stepmother took turns giving speeches, although my father was mostly silent unless prodded into murmurs by the women. My mother was saying, “If she is the one you really want, then far be it from me to stand in the way of your happiness, yet if I might speak in my own behalf …” The complex sentences with their unfamiliar locutions sometimes tripped my mother up, as though she were a debutante in her first long dress. Everything about the conference seemed dramatic—the late hour, the formal tone, even the notion that something momentous could or should be decided all at once. Soon my sister and I, sitting in the bleachers of the dark stairwell and peering down into the brightness, had sworn our own complicity by dissembling: both of us were excited by the prospect of living in a new city and shedding our difficult father, but we both pretended to be grief-struck. The real excitement, of course, lay in learning that a life could be changed and that one could enter a brand-new, better world (“I shall move wherever the children will have the cultural and eductional advantages of a major metropolis,” our mother was saying). That a life could be changed posited the still more thrilling notion that one had a thing called a life, a wonderful being that was growing silently inside like an infant. How its body would be formed and what its temperament would be like would surely remain unknown—along with the color of its eyes, the cubits of its height and the beauty of its face—up to the moment of birth. Until I heard the three adults discussing their lives and our lives (“I cannot lead my life in this way,” “The children have their whole lives before them”) I had never suspected that I’d been impregnated with this “life,” this tragic embryo. The divorce, for me, was primarily an accession into self-consciousness.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  Anyway, Daddy Draden and I meet online, start chatting—he lives only an hour away—and one night our planning comes together, and I’m watching the clock, a little drunk on Jack, and the snow’s coming down, hard enough that I’m afraid he’ll cancel, but there’s the knock at the door I’ve been waiting for. And that’s how I see my Dad for the first time. I open the door and shiver; I’ve followed his orders and am wearing nothing but boxer shorts because they turn him on. He’s standing on the stoop in the snowfall. He’s dressed in black work boots, black jeans, black T-shirt, black leather biker jacket and biker’s cap. He looks down at me and grins—he’s a good foot taller than me. “Damn, boy, you’re even hairier than I thought!” I look up into his dark eyes and grin back. “Good to meet you, Sir. I hope you like my fur.” Draden nods; we shake hands. I invite him in, offer him Jack. He wants beer instead. I keep drinking bourbon, because I’m scared and excited and I always like a little buzz going when I submit to a Top, especially a new one I don’t know real well yet. Don’t take long before he’s wrapped a short chain around my neck and padlocked it, so I guess I’m his for the evening. Then he’s behind me, holding me close, one big hand clamped over my mouth, the other tugging my tits. I’ve already told him online that my nips are my ON buttons, and he wastes no time taking advantage of that fact. I love the pressure of his hand over my mouth; I love the pain building up in my chest; I love this feeling of being mastered by an older, larger man. We’re on my bed now, frost feathering like maidenhair ferns across the bedroom window, the spruce trees outside covered with white. We’re both naked. I don’t know it now, but this is a scene I’m going to be jacking off to for the next half a decade. Draden has me on my elbows and knees. My hands are tied together and anchored to the headboard with a short rope-tether. I’ve got my hairy butt in the air; Dad’s strapped a ball-gag in my mouth and I’m drooling like a motherfucker, head down in the sheets while Dad kneels behind me, puts on a rubber and lubes us up. It hurts bad at first—I ain’t that used to being fucked, and Dad’s got an eight-incher and thick to boot—but soon enough we’re rocking together, back and forth, he’s thrusting in and out, I’m grunting like the happy pig I am. Dad cums up my butt; I cum in his hand about the same time. We snuggle, and oh, god, is that sweet, to be held so tender by a man who’d used me rough like a whore only minutes before.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  As with the sound of all boy voices, the Celestial is closely underwritten by the Feral. Snakes, snails, springy pups’ tails, umberocher-gold late Brahms, plus the precious-metal purity of a boyhood forever on hold. He is someone just about to deepen and to change for the better. Someone close to darkening at last into becoming truly thoughtful of others. Our boy is someone finally confident as he deserves. He will soon be someone far less riven by those gravitational erotic drives that condemn us always downward—toward unworthy if fascinating others. He must soon become a grown man, tamed and calmed and civilized at last. But not yet, not quite yet … World without end. Amen. — ALLAN GURGANUS is the author of numerous works of fiction, including Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, White People, Plays Well with Others , and most recently, The Practical Heart: Four Novellas . Among other honors, he has received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, the National Magazine Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives and gardens in a small town in North Carolina. TWO When I was fourteen, the summer before I went to prep school, a year before I met Kevin, I worked for my father. He wanted me to learn the value of a dollar. I did work, I did learn and I earned enough to buy a hustler. The downtown of the city Dad lived in was small, no larger than a few dozen blocks. Every morning my stepmother drove me into town from our house, the fake Norman castle that stood high and white on a hill above the steaming river valley; we’d go down into town—a rapid descent of several steep plunges into the creeping traffic, the dream dissolves of black faces, the smell of hot franks filtered through the car’s air-conditioned interior, the muted cries of newspaper vendors speaking their own incomprehensible language, the somber look of sooted façades edging forward to squeeze out the light. Downtown excited me: so many people, some of them just possibly an invitation to adventure or escape. As a little boy I’d thought of our house (the old Tudor one, not this new Norman castle) as the place God had meant us to own, but now I knew in a vague way that its seclusion and ease had been artificial and that it had strenuously excluded the city at the same time we depended on the city for food, money, comfort, help, even pleasure. The black maids were the representatives of the city I’d grown up among. I’d never wanted anything from them—nothing except their love.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  III Since Edmund White was born in 1940, he lived in round-number allegorical relation to the last six decades of our recent quick-change century. No intelligence stands readier to remember with perfect pitch a period whole-cloth: who else can tell us so exactly how its citizens then talked, dressed, contracepted, proceeded politically? So, at age forty, just at the start of the sexually liberated eighties (in 1982, the year after HIV first sent its silent tentacles among the erotically adventurous in Manhattan and San Francisco), White offered the world a seemingly autobiographical novel. It appears to map a boy’s coming to terms not simply with solitude, not just with his social destiny, but with a completely aestheticized vision only some scholastical and witty kid could so utterly perfect. The novel shows a child learning to face then exploit not just homo-sex, but sex in general. This work of principled sweep and great observational power also champions the centrality of Art as a governing quest. It offers this view with a faith that must recall Proust’s life project, his attempt to hold all of time, its characters at synchronous ages, all its warring textures, in one head, one work. But crucially, White also places the Erotic on a level of expressive possibility alongside the pursuit of work itself. “Love and Work.” Freud promised us two choices, in that order. But here sex replaces romantic love, even while groping elsewhere for it. If Love, in modern life, is really Sex, then Sex, undertaken with concentration and ambition enough, can ascend to Work, can’t it? The erotic is ranked, by the young man at the center of this fiction, as a great Darwinian organizing force for the good. We are told by White in 1982—using the voice of an erotically and cerebrally advanced fifteen-year-old facing his inaugural analyst—that life’s great divide really seems between those who are sexual, are “getting it” on a regular basis, and the others, lonely and—because silent—powerless: My first sight of the analytic couch constituted the primal scene, for only its existence jarred me into recognizing that the world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, and that they hold sway over a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners (or the luxury of systematic, sustained and shared introspection, so sexual in its own way). In 1982, this view of erotic power offered veriest catnip to the loud-because-too-long-silent cause of Gay Liberation. And A Boy’s Own Story , with mixed results for the book itself, became one of that young Movement’s essential works. It was read not simply as the rich entertainment and provocation it is, but, alas, as Theory.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  Young Tag obliged. From behind me, his strong arms slipped under my armpits and he clasped his hands behind my neck, positioning my mouth perfectly for a straight-on fuck from MacTag, who never took his dick out of my mouth. Young Tag’s dick was rock hard between my shoulder blades. Was I in heaven or wha-u-u-t? MacTag was shorter and stockier than Young Tag who himself, being a swimmer, was leaner and not quite as tall as Big Tag, who, I mentioned, was six-four and 225. They were like three studs in the same gene bank and all of them hung like sonsabitches with thirty-two inches among the three of them. The Tag Team worked my legs, squeezed me in bear hugs, double-teamed me, both of them working their own hard cocks, standing over me, talking dirty to me about their big animal cocks, dropping down with one knee across my chest, showing me the dick I wanted, teasing me with their huge pricks, then raising me up with aerial tactics, hammering me into the canvas like pro maniacs, always pulling their punches, squeezing tight on the choke holds, taking turns beating my face for real with their ten-inch cocks. I crumpled under the “brutal” bulldogging; but I wanted more. This was a championship bout of inches. We must have brawled off and on for almost an hour, which is a really long time when you’re wrestling or being mauled by two strong young cousins acting out on you the pro-wrestling fantasy they’ve played so often together. Finally, they pinned me. Again. Their weight on me felt like an avalanche of hot young jocks. Their dicks ran stout, stayed hard, pulsed for release. They slap-tagged each other’s hands and knelt up over my face, taking turns fucking my mouth, the taste of each distinctive, yet with that undertaste of the sweet, sweet, sweet Taggart genes. As much as they liked my mouth, they liked the mirror they were to each other: the heavier-muscled blond wrestler and the lean-muscled blond swimmer, so much alike in their sunny good-looking faces. Kneeling over my face, my mouth tonguing their furry balls, they sucked tongues and fingered nipples and beat their meat, building their passion to a climax.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  I would like to get up, go around the desk and perch upon the edge as professors do in the movies but we’d have to address my prick and that’s not a good idea just yet so I stay put, attempt to remain academic. “Reality is not the basis of fiction, I don’t care what television says. Listen to yourself, make something up and try to stay within the rules of composition, however constraining they might feel. Your story is powerful, you portray vivid scenes and your characters are well drawn, but there’s an underlying chaos that would make an editor toss it. Sometimes you have to compromise. You can turn yourself loose on the page to some degree but not entirely.” Oh, how I want to pull out my dick, for this is beyond exciting. It would take just a stroke or two to get off. Or he could suck the thing. I clear my throat as the image sets my heart racing. “I hope you understand,” I rasp. I reach for my water bottle, take a swig. “Please don’t take the criticism personally as it’s not intended that way. I am offering guidance. And I very much look forward to your next story.” “I’m working on it, but what you said about this one sort of upset things.” “A writer must develop not only his talent but a thick skin. Criticism will always be part of the writer’s life. You must learn to listen, weigh, sort and choose to embrace it or not. You have talent, Harley. Now work with it, get it into shape, reel it in a bit and you’ll find it works all the better.” He relaxes with my assurance. He settles into the chair, puts his story into the backpack, smiles. Now would be the time to fuck him. He’d be receptive, grateful, but I keep this to myself. When he rises I do not. “I’m available any time you have questions or concerns,” I tell him and he replies with thanks. And then he is gone. Leaping up, I lock the door, get out the fresh come rag, and settle back to free my cock. Before I take hold, I replay everything about our encounter, listening to him again, seeing him sit forward as he expresses his unrest. I see the bulge of cock and with this image I grab my own, stroking as he might until I erupt. It is prodigious, as befits my feelings. A promising boy does stir the pot.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Chuck forged an invitation from his mother to me, something I could show the school authorities, and he drove me for the weekend to his family’s deserted beach house. His parents were off in Florida. Everything here was gray and thawing, the sky and the lake anagrams for each other, iceberg of cloud above a cumulus of ice. We played a record of Big Bill Broonzy over and over again as we lounged about and looked out the plate-glass windows at a surrealists’ world in which whatever had been hard seemed to be going soft. We drank beer after beer (Chuck pried the caps off with his teeth), we fell asleep in our clothes on adjoining couches, we were continuously hung over, we set out giant steaks to thaw, we awoke at dawn or dusk, who knew which in that long weekend of freedom, melting ice and nausea. Although I certainly wasn’t a straight-A student I’d at least always been conscientious in school. In one sense my doggedness was a way of hedging my bets, so that no matter how despairing I might be I was implicitly counting on my eventual happiness. Even as I made much of present miseries I was cautiously planning my bourgeois future. There was nothing cautious about Chuck. He had his own trust fund from a grandmother who owned a cosmetics firm. He had a loud, maniacal laugh, he was big physically and knew it and half-scared people with his craziness, his drunk sprees, the way he’d twitch or shoot his cuffs or without warning scythe the air between you with a closed fist and shriek like a samurai. He scared the masters because he didn’t want or need their approval and because he’d set himself up as an arbiter of absurdity. If a teacher said something banal or foolish or pompous in class, Chuck would quake with silent laughter until he was weeping and had slid halfway out of his seat onto the floor, a helpless sprawl of laughter. He appeared to be in actual pain and every eye was on him. No number of demerits or revoked privileges or low grades intimidated him. He had no particular ambition to go on to college, nor did he doubt his own intelligence which, in the Amercian fashion of that day, had been Tested; he’d been Certified as falling well within the Genius Range and declared that most appealing of creatures, the Underachiever, a status he jealously preserved except in English class, an honors section conducted by a half-blind white-haired amphibian who paddled at the air with one wounded web, who pronounced poetry as “putrid” minus the final d and who was so absent-minded he’d once heard the bell for class and stepped off a high library ladder into thin air.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  My favorite smoker was Chuck, a gangly, pimply, popular guy with the gift of gab and the ambition to be a writer like Hemingway. Chuck was rumored to have the biggest dick on campus, but I never got to check it out. He was from a rich family and after listening to his stories of life at home I pieced together a glamorous feature film of two-seater planes, a sheep ranch in Montana, a fishing camp in Canada, a private island off Georgia—though Chuck didn’t give a damn about possessions, all he wanted to do was stuff two fat black whores into his rattletrap Chevy and head south with them and a case of beer and of painful but not quite incapacitating clap and holler curse words at Arkansas cops and pass out from tequila, fatigue and sunburn at a two-bit rodeo in some dusty Texas town before he revived long enough to slip over the border into Tijuana, where he’d find those magic mushrooms or whatever the hell they were and that fabled gal in a straw basket hung on ropes from the ceiling, just her cunt exposed as she’s lowered onto your stiff prong as you lie back and let the big-eyed nine-year-old girl assistant slowly, solemnly spin the basket and fan the flies off your face. Chuck forged an invitation from his mother to me, something I could show the school authorities, and he drove me for the weekend to his family’s deserted beach house. His parents were off in Florida. Everything here was gray and thawing, the sky and the lake anagrams for each other, iceberg of cloud above a cumulus of ice. We played a record of Big Bill Broonzy over and over again as we lounged about and looked out the plate-glass windows at a surrealists’ world in which whatever had been hard seemed to be going soft. We drank beer after beer (Chuck pried the caps off with his teeth), we fell asleep in our clothes on adjoining couches, we were continuously hung over, we set out giant steaks to thaw, we awoke at dawn or dusk, who knew which in that long weekend of freedom, melting ice and nausea. Although I certainly wasn’t a straight-A student I’d at least always been conscientious in school. In one sense my doggedness was a way of hedging my bets, so that no matter how despairing I might be I was implicitly counting on my eventual happiness. Even as I made much of present miseries I was cautiously planning my bourgeois future.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  He was just fourteen and still at times a silly kid, especially just before lights out. We had half an hour (if you please) of “free” time after evening study hall before we had to submit to silence, a rustling, Argus-eyed silence (if Argus was a lonely, horny tribe of kids) intensified by wide-awake yearning. In that brief spasm of freedom before lights-out, competing radios would blare out, tuned to a dozen different stations, and pent-up athletes, sore from two hours of immobility at their desks, would explode into shouting football matches in the corridors. Toilets flushed, steam from showers crept out of the bathrooms into the unheated corridors. In one room five boys were sitting around in the dark lighting farts. One expert—fully clothed of course—was lying on his back, legs above his head, holding a lit match to the seat of his pants. A quick spurt of blue flame was his reward. The whole building trembled with the thundering of boys climbing up and down stairs or now shrieking in a water fight by the cooler. Heberto was also full of energy. Look at the vein pulsing in his neck, the aimless trills his long fingers are playing, the weird ululations hooting out of his mouth—until after the fact he invents an explanation of all this spontaneity by resolving himself into an airplane, the hoots modulating into the drone of jets, his flickering hands freezing into rigid wings, the ticking vein force-feeding fuel into the engine as he runs and runs, hysterical with youth, up and down the halls. After such an outburst he could be visited. I’d sit on his bed and watch him carve bits of balsa wood with an X-Acto knife. His eyes would dart up from his task. Everything about him was high-strung, tentative, off course. I never found out why he’d been shunted off to Eton in the middle of the year. The other newcomer, Howie, was my real companion, friend and enemy, someone whose room I couldn’t resist visiting though I didn’t want the other kids to see me going there. Howie had been a bleak, sit-in-a-stupor nihilist, he told me, but now he’d ascended to the discipline and heartlessness of the Nazi Party. A real Nazi. He’d written away for the “literature” of the American Renaissance Party and proudly showed me his foot-long library of books on race, the Aryan heritage, the Führer’s legacy, Communist lies about the “so-called death camps” and so on. He was almost as fat as he was tall.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  And for once, she didn’t ask any more questions. There’s Plenty to DO and Plenty to SEE Wherever You Go in [image "Florida" file=Image00029.jpg] [image "Florida" file=Image00029.jpg] From the Northwest Tip to the Romantic Keys, You’ll Find Infinite Variety. That’s Why So Many Thousands Come Down and Enjoy the Glorious Sunshine Outdoor Sports and Scenic Wonders Get in the NATIONAL Habit Fly National Airlines Airline of the Stars Finest Aircraft! Finest Service! 21 [image "image" file=Image00005.jpg] [image file=Image00005.jpg] GabyGaby Wenders always wanted to fly. She’d wave to the planes as they flew across the wide-open fields behind her grandmother’s house on their approach to Vandalia Airport between Dayton and Springfield, imagining the exciting lives of the passengers inside the silver ship—all of them rich and good-looking, all of them dressed in the stylish travel clothes she’d seen in her older sister’s fashion magazines. At thirteen, she’d stand in front of the mirror and practice. Welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen, she would say in her new, well-modulated voice. I am your lovely and perfectly groomed air hostess, Miss Gabrielle Wenders. Your pilot today is Scotty Champion. She’d smile ever so slightly, her fingertips touching the silver wings on the lapel of her suit jacket. Captain Scotty Champion would be so handsome the female passengers would swoon at the sight of him. She might marry Scotty Champion someday, but not for many years, at least three, because she’d worked hard for her career and wasn’t about to give it up for marriage. In high school Gaby sent away for a brochure. She’d memorized it in the first week but she still liked to see it in print before closing her eyes at night. Girls Wanted to Enter Flight Stewardess Training GroupHere is the Career Opportunity for Which You Have Been Waiting!If you are interested and feel that you can meet all of the qualifications below, please write in detail and attach a full length photograph. HEIGHT: Between 5’2” and 5’6” WEIGHT: 135 pounds maximum ATTRACTIVE: “Just below Hollywood” standards PLENTY OF PERSONALITY AND POISE GENDER: Female MARITAL STATUS: Single, Not Divorced, Separated or Widowed RACE: White AGE: 21–26 years old EDUCATION: Registered Nurse or Two Years of College VISION: 20/20 without glasses MUST BE A US CITIZEN AND AVAILABLE FOR TRAINING WITHIN 6 MONTHS. IF YOU FEEL YOU QUALIFY— If? Gaby thought. Come on! She qualified with a capital Q. To get her parents’ blessing she showed them a line in a magazine about how being a stewardess was a career for “Wives-in-Training.” She knew they’d approve of that. Getting her RN degree at the local hospital took two years, and Gaby worked for a year after that, until she could apply, which she did, on her twenty-first birthday. At the time she was still living at home with her parents and her younger brothers, her older sister long married, with four-year-old twins, another on the way and a husband who operated a forklift.