Fear

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 My Life on the Road (2015)

  They are playing the game as it exists. I’m trying to change it—and I’ve failed. There is little more painful than surrealism when you yourself are the only contrast. • I’ve passed by Laurel, Maryland, on trips to and from Washington, D.C., for years, but I haven’t a clue what goes on there. Then one day in 1982 when I’m enjoying being at my desk at Ms. magazine after a long stretch of road trips, I get a call from Connie Bowman, a brand-new marketing director at the Freestate Raceway in Laurel. Since harness racing is a national and global attraction for the subcultures of racing and betting—and since both subcultures are overwhelmingly male—Bowman wants to attract more women. Her idea is to invite me and Loretta Swit, star of one of the most-watched series in TV history, to race each other in an event to be called M*A*S*H vs. Ms. In return, each of us will get a percentage of the gate to give away. This captures my attention. Ms. magazine has discovered that very few advertisers will support a women’s magazine that doesn’t devote its editorial pages to praising the products it advertises: fashion, beauty, home decoration, and the like. To make up for the lack of ads in Ms. —and to meet requests for subscriptions from battered women’s shelters, prisons, welfare programs, and just readers who can’t afford them—we have to raise contributions. This is why I find myself on a warm summer evening, dressed in white pants and green and gold racing silks, standing in front of a huge, blindingly lit stadium filled with thousands of shouting strangers cheering for their favorite horses plus the novelty bet of Loretta or me. Loretta is wearing white pants plus blue and red silks, and we are both peering out from under white crash helmets emblazoned “M*A*S*H vs. Ms. ” Beyond us is a huge oval racetrack so preternaturally lit up by klieg lights that I’m told astronauts can see it from space. Both of us are about to put our lives in the hands of horses and jockeys we don’t know. This feels more surrealistic than it sounded on the phone. Officials walk us to our respective rigs. Mine is pulled by a beautiful chestnut mare and guided by a skinny, older black driver. He is unusual in this traditionally white world of southern horse racing. Loretta has a younger white driver and a dark-coated gelding. We each seat ourselves next to the driver on a plank no bigger than an ironing board that is attached to a superlight rig. The whole thing is more like a coat hanger than the Ben-Hur chariot I envisioned. As we trot out to the track where other teams are assembled, we already seem to be going very fast. After the starting signal, that speed is much faster. I realize I’m sitting only inches above a track that is whizzing underneath me in a blur.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Now it was easy to walk up to, to insult, or to strike the beast of prey, free and proud a minute ago, rendered quite inoffensive now. Gil -turned back toward Mario. The childlike aspect of his soul which had come to his help for an instant was completely gone now. Yielding to the need to utter at least one lovely phrase before dying-though sometimes, even silence ,can be such an impressive line-that would sum up his life, that would consummate .it regally, well, just express it-he said : "C'est la vie." When he entered the Police Chief's office he was overcome first by the tremendous heat in the room and felt himself going soft to the point of thinking he would die of exhaustion, incapable of any effort to escape the radiator which was already trembling with expectation, preparing to uncoil like an anaconda in order to wrap itself round him and strangle him. He was suffering from both fear and shame. He reproached himself 147 I QUERELLE for not being as magnificent as he should have been. The walls seemed to hold blood-oripping secrets, more terrible than his own. His physical appearance surprised the Police Chief. He would never have dreamt the murderer looked like this. When he had instructed !vtario to put a little more zing into the investigation, he had been unable to resist the temptation to describe the potential suspect in some detail. However, crime is an area where previous experience is virtually useless. He had been sitting there at his desk, toying with a ruler, trying to conjure up the portrait of a homosexual murderer. Mario had listened, without believing a word of it. "There are precedents. Like Vacher. These are types who get carried away by their vices. Sadists, that's what they are. And these two murders are the handiwork of a sadist."· \Vith similar buoyant assurance the Commissioner had then gone on to discuss the matter with his counterpart in the Navy Police. Both of them ended up struggling to make the notion of a murderer coincide with their notions of what inverts were, what they looked like. They invented monsters. The Police

• From Querelle (1953)

  53 I QUERELLE up his face at the same time, in all innocence, partly shadowed by the screen of his hands. "And what are you going to do?" HMe ... ? Nothing. \Vhat d'you suppose. I'll just be wait ing for you to get back." Once again Dede looked at Mario. He gazed at him for a 'couple of seconds, his mouth half-open and dry. "I'm scared," he thought. He took a pull at his cigarette and said: "All right." He turned to the mirror to adjust the peak of his cap, to bend it over a little more to the left. In the mirror he could see the whole room in which he had now lived for over a year. It was smaii, cold, and on the wails there were some photographs of prize fighters and female movie stars, clipped out of the papers. The only luxury item was the light fixture above the divan: an electric bulb in a pale pink glass tulip. He did not despise Mario for being scared. Quite some time ago he had understood the nobility of self-acknowledged fear, what he called the jitters, or cold feet ... Often enough he had been forced to take to his heels in order to escape from some dangerous and armed foe. He hoped that Mario would accept the chaiienge to fight, having decided himself, should a good occasion arise, to knock off the docker who had just come o ut of the joint. To save Mario would be to save himself. And it was natural enough for anyone to be scared of Tony the Docker. He was a fierce and unscrupulous brute. On the other hand, it seemed strange to Dede that a mere criminal should cause The Police to tremble, and for the first time he had his doubts that this invisible and ideal force which he served and behind which he sheltered migh t just consist of weak humans. And, as this truth dawned on him, through a little crack in himself, he fel t both weaker and-strangely enough-stronger. For the first time he was taking thought, and this frightened him a little. "What about your ch ief? Haven't you told him?" "Don 't you \VOrry about that. I've told you your job: now get

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Who?” she asked herself. “All or one?” And not assisting the harassed young man she was dancing with in the conversation, the thread of which he had lost and could not pick up again, she obeyed with external liveliness the peremptory shouts of Korsunsky starting them all into the _grand rond_, and then into the _chaîne_, and at the same time she kept watch with a growing pang at her heart. “No, it’s not the admiration of the crowd has intoxicated her, but the adoration of one. And that one? can it be he?” Every time he spoke to Anna the joyous light flashed into her eyes, and the smile of happiness curved her red lips. She seemed to make an effort to control herself, to try not to show these signs of delight, but they came out on her face of themselves. “But what of him?” Kitty looked at him and was filled with terror. What was pictured so clearly to Kitty in the mirror of Anna’s face she saw in him. What had become of his always self-possessed resolute manner, and the carelessly serene expression of his face? Now every time he turned to her, he bent his head, as though he would have fallen at her feet, and in his eyes there was nothing but humble submission and dread. “I would not offend you,” his eyes seemed every time to be saying, “but I want to save myself, and I don’t know how.” On his face was a look such as Kitty had never seen before.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  But by the time I came home from India, communal travel had come to seem natural to me. I had learned that being isolated in a car was not always or even usually the most rewarding way to travel: I would miss talking to fellow travelers and looking out the window. How could I enjoy getting there when I couldn’t pay attention? I stopped making excuses for being the rare American who didn’t want to own a car. I even stopped citing environmental excuses, or explaining that Jack Kerouac didn’t drive either. As he said, he didn’t “know how to drive, just typewrite.” I did sometimes quote public opinion polls that rated New Yorkers as the happiest of Americans. Why? Because in the nondriving capital of the nation, we actually see each other in the street instead of being isolated in speeding tin cans. But the truth is, I didn’t decide on not driving. It decided on me. Now when I’m asked with condescension why I don’t drive—and I am still asked—I just say: Because adventure starts the moment I leave my door. I.I am in a taxi on my way with a friend to JFK, an airport named after a president who was assassinated only six years before. Our older driver is like a rough trade character from a Tennessee Williams play—complete with an undershirt revealing tattoos, and an old Marine Corps photo stuck in the frame of his hack license. Clearly, this is his taxi and his world. My friend and I are acting a lot like lovers, which we are. We are also hyperaware that the driver is looking at us in the rearview mirror. That’s because, while we waited with our luggage in a darkening street, a low-slung car full of white teenagers sped by, leaving behind in the evening air the lethal word “Nigger!” Now I can feel us struggling to forget that surreal attack and stay ourselves. When we reach the airport, the driver slides open the divider between the front and back seat. Both my friend and I grow tense. I always think that talking into that opening makes me feel as if I’m ordering French fries, but this time, I am grateful for the barrier. We have no idea what the driver thinks of us. The driver thrusts something through the opening. It turns out to be an old battered photo of a young man in a suit, standing with his arm around a plump and smiling young woman who is clutching her purse with both hands. “That’s me and my wife when we got married,” he says. “Except for when I was in Korea, we haven’t spent a night apart for forty years. She’s my best friend, my sweetheart—but believe me, we weren’t supposed to get married. Her family is Jewish from Poland, mine is Sicilian Catholic—they wouldn’t even speak to each other until after their first grandchild was born.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  His flesh felt hot beneath her, and thrown over his back as she was, she boldly kissed his sore buttocks. Then she was laid down on the bed and realized she was beside the Queen, looking up into her eyes, as the Queen, who rested on her elbow, looked down at her. Beauty's breath left her in rapid gasps. The Queen seemed quite enormous to her. And now she perceived a great resemblance to the Prince, only as always the Queen seemed infinitely colder. Yet there was about her red mouth something which might have once been called sweetness. She had thick eyelashes, a firm chin, and as she smiled dimples showed in her cheeks. Her face was heart shaped. Flustered, Beauty closed her eyes, biting her lip so hard she might have cut it. "Look at me," said the Queen. "I want to see your eyes, naturally. I want no modesty from you now, do you understand me?" "Yes, your Highness," Beauty answered. She wondered if the Queen might hear her heart beat. The bed was soft beneath her, the pillows soft, and she found herself staring at the Queen's great breasts, the dark circle of a nipple beneath the gown, before she looked at the Queen's eyes again obediently. A shock passed through her, collecting in a knot in her belly. The Queen merely studied her in great absorption. Her teeth showed perfectly white between her lips, and those eyes, slanted, long, were black to the core and revealed nothing. "Sit there, Alexi," the Queen said without looking away. And Beauty saw him take his position at the foot of the bed, with his arms folded on his chest, and his back to the bedpost. "Little plaything," the Queen said under her breath to Beauty. "And now I understand perhaps why Lady Juliana is so enraptured over you." She ran her hand over Beauty's face, her cheeks, her eyelids. She pinched Beauty's mouth. She smoothed back her hair, and then she slapped Beauty's breasts to the right and to the left and again. Beauty's mouth quivered but she made no sound. She kept her hands still at her sides. The Queen was like a light that threatened to blind her. If she thought about it, lying here so near the Queen, she would be overcome with panic. The Queen's hand moved over her belly and her thighs. It pinched the flesh of her thighs and then the backs of her legs at the calves. And in spite of herself Beauty felt a tingling everywhere she was touched as if the hand itself had some dreadful power.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Rather I shall see her face with it as I spank her." In a blur, Beauty saw Prince Alexi move to the dressing table. And then before her, propped against a silk pillow, was the mirror, tilted so she could see the Queen's smooth white face in it distinctly. The dark eyes terrified her. The Queen's smile terrified her. "But I shall show her nothing," Beauty thought desperately, shutting her eyes, the tears squeezed out down her cheeks. "Surely, there is something superior about the open hand," the Queen was saying, her left hand on Beauty's neck, massaging it. She slipped it down under Beauty's breasts, and pushing them closer to one another, touched both nipples with her long fingers. "Have I not spanked you with my hand as hard as any man, Alexi?" "To be sure, your Highness," he answered softly. He was behind Beauty again. Perhaps he had taken his place against the bedpost. "Now clasp your hands in the small of your back and keep them there," said the Queen. And she closed her hand over Beauty's buttocks just as she had closed her other hand over Beauty's breasts. "And acknowledge my commands to you, Princess." "Yes, your Highness," Beauty struggled to respond, but to her further shame her voice broke into sobs and she shivered trying to restrain them. "And be quieter than that," said the Queen sharply. The Queen commenced to spank her. One great hard slap after another fell on her buttocks, and if a paddle had ever been worse she could not remember it. She tried to be still, to be quiet, to show nothing, nothing, as she repeated that word over and over in her mind, but she could feel herself writhing. It was as Leon had said with the Bridle Path; you always struggle as if you could escape the paddle, squirm away from it. And she heard herself crying out suddenly in gasps as the slaps stung her. The Queen's hand seemed immense and hard and heavier than the paddle. It shaped itself to her as it spanked her, and she realized she was frantic, full of tears, and cries, and all of this for the Queen to see in her cursed mirror. Yet she could not stop it. And the Queen's other hand pinched her breasts, stretched her nipples one at a time, letting them go, and stretching them again, as the spanks went on and on until Beauty was sobbing. Anything would have been better. Rushing through the hall at the end of Lord Gregory's paddle, the Bridle Path, even the Bridle Path, was better for there was some escape in the movement, and here there was nothing but the pain, her enflamed buttocks laid bare for the Queen who now sought out new spots, spanking on the left buttock and then the right, and then covering Beauty's thighs with smacks while Beauty's buttocks seemed to swell and throb unbearably.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Nonsense, my darling, follow the path. It will unwind slowly before you, you will see its turns well in advance, and stop only if you see the slave before you stopped. Now and then the line is stopped, for as the slaves come before the Queen, they must stop for praise or condemnation. She is on a great pavilion to your right, but don't glance at her when you step out of the paddle will catch you off guard." "O, please, I shall faint, I can't, I can't..." "Beauty, Beauty," said the pretty Princess in front of her, "just follow my example." And Beauty realized with horror there was no one left but this girl. But then that one who had just been spanked was placed before her, and ushered out to the waiting paddle. The girl was frantic, sobbing, but she kept her hands on her neck, and soon she was running beside her laughing rider, a tall young Lord who lifted his arm way back as he spanked her. Suddenly another rider appeared, the elderly Lord Gerhardt, and as Beauty watched in terror, the pretty Princess ran out to receive the first blows and run with graceful lifts of her knees beside him. But for all her complaints, the Lord's horse seemed to move terribly fast and the paddle was loud and merciless. Beauty was forced to the threshold of the garden. For the first time she stared at the true immensity of the Court, the dozens upon dozens of tables that sprawled out on the green and appeared in great numbers in the forest beyond it. Everywhere were servants and naked slaves. It was perhaps three times the size she had judged from the windows. She felt tiny, insignificant, for all her terror. Lost and without a name or a soul suddenly. "What am I now," she might have thought, but she could not think. And as if in nightmare, she saw all the faces of those at the nearest tables, Lords and Ladies twisted to see the Bridle Path, and far to her loomed the pavilion of the Queen, canopied and festooned with flowers. She was gasping for breath, and when she looked up and saw the splendid mounted figure of Lady Juliana, her eyes filled with tears of gratitude that it was she, though she knew Lady Juliana would spank her perhaps all the harder to do her duty. The lovely Lady's braids were done with the same silver that threaded her shapely gown. She seemed made for the sidesaddle in which she sat and the handle of her paddle was laced to her wrist. She was smiling. There was no time to see more, to think more.

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  “I didn’t know if I’d come out on the other side of it,” Spiegelman says in MetaMaus. “I knew I was taking on something enormously difficult… .” He adds, “And from the get-go, I was trying to give shape to it without knowing what that final shape would be… . “The subject of Maus isn’t just the story of a son having problems with his father, and it’s not just the story of what a father lived through. It’s about choices being made, of finding what one can tell, and what one can reveal, and what one can reveal beyond what one knows one is revealing.” He says you’re “putting the dead into little boxes.” RISKING DISTORTION OF THE UNDERLYING REALITY “There are so many choices, so many options and so many ways to assign perspective to the material.” Spiegelman says, “… giving shape also involves, by definition, the risk of distorting the underlying reality. “Perhaps the only honest way to present such material is to say: ‘Here are all the documents I used, you go through them. And here’s a twelve-foot shelf of works to give these documents context, and here’s like thousands of hours of tape recording, and here’s a bunch of photographs to look at. Now, go make yourself a Maus!’“ Art by Art GO MAKE YOURSELF A MAUS. The propulsion for Art Spiegelman to create Maus was in part “an impulse to look dead-on at the root causes of my own deepest fears and nightmares,” and his life was never the same. With Calling Dr. Laura, Nicole Georges ushered in a new relationship with her family. Vanessa Davis says, “I feel a bit unsupervised in the world. Putting the comics out there helps me with that.” In The Photographer, Didier Lefèvre says, “I wonder what I’m doing here? I answer it by taking photos.” Oliver Ka faced down a demon in Why I Killed Peter. And I traced the outlines forward in my own life and tried to follow them into the future. Nicole Georges says something funny about her story: “Internally, it isn’t a part of me anymore. Is it gross to say it was like a placenta? Like, the book is a new organ I grew for a specific purpose, gave birth to, and now it belongs to everyone else. I can let the story go in some ways. I created a bridge between myself and the world where otherwise there was silence and isolation in dysfunctional secrecy.” Whatever metaphor you use, or whatever function it serves, experience that new growth. Nurture it and release it. If there’s one point to this section, it’s that the act of making your book or project or story shouldn’t merely be one of “telling a story.” It should change you. The telling of your story is a process. The best way to finish is to be engaged in that process.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Be still, my dear," he said matter-of-factly. "Your nipples are tender and must be slightly toughened. You've been subjected to very little sport so far from your love-stricken master." Beauty was frightened by this. Her nipples felt painfully hard to her; she knew her face had colored darkly. It seemed all the feeling in her breasts swelled and pumped towards those tiny hard nipples. Mercifully, Leon let go of her breasts with a hard squeeze. But then he parted her legs and rubbed the oil into her inner thighs, and this was even worse for her. She could feel her sex throbbing. She wondered if it gave off heat that he could feel with his hands. She hoped he would be quick. Yet even as she lay, red faced and trembling, he pushed her legs farther apart, and to her horror, parted the lips of her sex with his fingers as though inspecting her. "O, please..." she whispered, turning her head from side to side, her eyes stinging. "Now, Beauty," he scolded gently, "you must never never plead for anything from anyone, not even from your loyal and devoted groom. I must inspect you to see if you are sore, and as I thought, you are. Your Prince has been rather...devoted." Beauty bit her lip and closed her eyes as he widened the orifice and now oiled it. She felt as if she were being pulled apart, and even under the plaster that tiny knot of feeling throbbed above the opening Leon's fingers had broadened. "If he touches it, I shall die," she thought, but he was quite careful not to do that, though she felt his fingers entering her, and massaging the lips of her vagina. "Poor darling slave," he whispered to her with feeling. "Now sit up. If I were to have my way, you would rest. But Lord Gregory wants you to see the rest of the Training Hall and the Hall of Punishments. Let me finish your hair quickly." He began to brush Beauty's hair and arrange it in coils on the back of her head as she sat, still trembling, her knees drawn up, and her head bowed. THE TRAINING HALL BEAUTY WASN'T certain that she hated Lord Gregory. Perhaps there was something comforting in his air of command. What would it be like to be here without someone who directed her so completely? But he appeared obsessed with his duties. As soon as he took her out of Leon's hands, he gave her two gratuitous blows with the paddle before ordering her to her knees to follow him. She was to keep close to the heel of his right boot, and she was to observe all that was around her. "But you must never look at the faces of your masters and mistresses, you must never try to meet their eyes, and there is not to be a sound out of you," he directed, "save your answers to me."

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  And perhaps she should see the Hall of Punishments, how those disobedient slaves are chastised using the very pleasure they have learned to feel here." THE HALL OF PUNISHMENTS AT THE door of the new hall, Lord Gregory signaled one of the busy Pages. "Bring Princess Lizetta here," he said raising his voice slightly. "Sit back on your heels, Beauty, with your hands behind your neck and observe all that's presented for your benefit." The unfortunate Princess Lizetta was apparently just being brought in, and Beauty saw at once that she was gagged but rather simply so. A small cylinder covered with leather and shaped like a dog's bone was forced into her mouth and back so far between her teeth that it was rather like a bit, and apparently she could not have dislodged it with her tongue if she had wanted to. She was crying angrily and kicking, as the Page who held her hands behind her back gestured for yet another Page to take her about the waist and carry her to Lord Gregory. She was placed on her knees right before Beauty, her black hair falling down in front of her face, her dark breasts heaving. "Petulance, my Lord," said the Page rather wearily. "She was to be quarry in the Hunt in the Maze when she refused to give her Lords and Ladies good sport. The usual nonsense." Princess Lizetta tossed her black hair over her shoulder and let out a little contemptuous growl from behind the gag, which astonished Beauty. "Ah, and impudence as well," said Lord Gregory. He reached down and lifted her chin. Her dark eyes evinced nothing but anger as she looked up at him and she turned her head so sharply that she was soon free of him. The page gave her several hard spanks but she showed no contrition. Her little buttocks looked hard in fact. "Double her, for punishment," said Lord Gregory. "I think a real punishment is in order." Princess Lizetta gave several high-pitched groans. They seemed both anger and protest. She seemed not to have bargained for this, and as she was carried ahead of Beauty and Lord Gregory into the Hall of Punishments, the Pages quickly affixed leather cuffs to her wrists and ankles, each cuff with a heavy metal hook imbedded in it. Now she was raised, struggling, to a great low beam that spanned the room, her wrists hung from a hook above her head and then her legs brought straight up in front of her so that her ankles were fixed to the same hook. She was, in fact, bent double.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  AFTER DINNER, KURT TOOK ME BACK TO AN APARTMENT THAT looked like nobody lived there, gave me something to drink, and led me through the living room with its black leather couch and glass coffee table into his bedroom. Closing the door behind him, he showed me the hand weights he kept in a line by the wall, like shoes, and then pushed me toward a desk. I remember his hands always on my body, and even before he pulled the mirror and the razor blade out of the center drawer, I was thinking, This isn’t good. Kurt reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a paper packet—druggie origami—tapping two snowy piles onto the glass. I watched him chopping and scraping, wincing a bit at the sound, a fork on china, nails on a chalkboard, a warning alarm I would fail to heed. Down to the roots of my nerve fibers, I knew the thing to do was get out, but this was to be a night of many college firsts: first restaurant date, first ride in a Porsche, first blow. Kurt rolled a crisp green bill from his wallet and showed me what to do. It burned. And then? Not much. The coke had done nothing more than make my eyes feel really, really wide open. I would be hyperalert for what came next. Which was also almost nothing. He kissed me, and as he did, he pulled me away from the desk and down onto the bed. He was the world’s worst kisser, all probing tongue, like a sea slug trying to move down my throat. I was repulsed, but saved (I know now) by the coke: Kurt couldn’t get it up. He rolled against me, and through the thin fabric of his dress khakis, I could feel him against my thigh, soft as a dinner roll. George Michael sang through the speakers. Rather than pursue what he must have known from experience was a losing game, Kurt sprang from the bed, as if he’d planned it that way, and went to the stereo to turn it up. I will be your father figure. Thirty minutes later, when I asked for a ride back to the dorm, he gave me one without much of a fight. In the Por-sha. The next day, apparently having had more fun than I had, Kurt called to ask if I’d go with him to Shasta Lake, an annual Memorial Day fraternity tradition at the University of Oregon: at least a hundred rented houseboats, each carrying eight or so couples, kegs tapped and flowing, red Solo cups bobbing in the water like buoys. Imagine the drinking and the drugs. Imagine the sleeplessness and the unfinished brains. Imagine the heat, the dehydration, and the food packed by the boy-men hosting this nightmare. Imagine that nobody on the whole boat had the sense to bring sunscreen. Imagine the depth of seething, unmet need—and then imagine the depth of the water.

• From Querelle (1953)

  The insinuating sentence began with a "but" so heavy with hypocrisy that Querelle, whose common approach was a brusque one, was instantly reminded of Lieutenant Seblon and his wily ways, his roundabout approaches. Gil felt the blood draining away from his face. His life, his presence within himself, rushed to his eyes and made them burn, escaped through them to lose itself, to disperse among the dark shadows of the dungeon. He had to hesitate before answering, not with the kind of hesitation where time is gained by cold-blooded reasoning for and against, but out of a feeling close to complete prostration, aggravated by the impression that it would be useless to deny anything, and this, too, locked his jaws. The charge was so serious that he had to make an effort to comprehend it at all. He remained mute, tried to lose himself in a fixed stare, and became so self-conscious of it that he could feel the muscles round his eyes twitching. Unblinking, he pressed his lips together, until they became a thin line. "Well? That sailor. What made you snuff him?" "He didn't do it." As if half asleep Gil listened to Querelle's question and Roger's answer. The sound of their voices didn't bother him at all. He had withdrawn totally into the intensity of his stare, while being aware of its fixity. "Who was it then, if it wasn't him?" Gil turned his head and looked Querelle in the eye. 17% I JEAN GENET "It wasn't me, I swear! I can't tell you who did it, I don't know nothing about it. But I'm telling you, by all that's sacred, I swear I didn't do it." "The papers said they was sure it was you, all right. I'm willing to believe you, but you'd have soine explaining to do if the cops got you. See, they found your cigarette lighter, right by that stiff. Anyhow, you better keep the profile low." Gil resigned himself to the second murder. When the monstrousness o_f his deed had first blurred his vision, he had thought of turning himself in. He had thought that once the police had recognized his innocence of the second crime, they would let him go, so that he could go and hide again because of the first one. He thought they would respect the rules of the game. The insanity of this train of thought soon became apparent to him. Thus, little by little, Gil took the murder of the sailor upon himself. He tried to think of reasons for doing it. Sometimes he wondered who the true murderer might be. He interrogated himself to find our how he had managed to lose his cigarette lighter at the scene of the crime. "I would really like to know who did it. I hadn't even noticed I didn't have that lighter any more."

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Many lesbians had survived everything from family exile to Freudian theory, from remaining closeted in order to keep their jobs to coming out and losing custody of their own children. Besides enduring violence directed at females in general, they faced the added danger of being raped as a punishment, or as a “conversion” to heterosexuality. No lesbian was completely safe, but for those without traditional families, secret communities could mean more safety and a chosen family. On the road, I met couples traveling in RVs and discovered that a national roving group called RV Women provided campgrounds and community. Other gatherings were massive and seasonal—most famously, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. From 1976 to 2015, thousands of women and girls, lesbians and otherwise, came for part or all of the month of August to camp on acres of man-free Michigan forest and experience music groups, visual arts, and sports in safety and freedom. Other secrets were small but permanent, like lesbian retirement communities in Florida, or the Last Perch, a creation of a California couple whose vision went from aging to hospice. In 2001 I discovered an all-female trailer park near Tucson, Arizona. After being let through a double gate with a safety code that changed daily, I found myself on streets named for admired women in history. Suddenly I could imagine living on the corner of Emma Goldman and Gertrude Stein, or following Dorothy Height to Eleanor Roosevelt. At the center of all the neat rows of trailers was a clubhouse where women could gather for everything from book clubs to gambling. Now secrecy has become less necessary for safety, and, at least in some parts of the country, lesbian couples and their children are treated like other families. On the Web there are LGBTQ resort and retirement places for a larger community of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people. Yet whether we are born women or become women, many of us still find more safety in each other’s company than in the company of men, and more safety than men find in one another’s company. As long as there is danger, there will be secrets. But most of all, I owe my discovery of the power of secrets to migrant farmworkers. Without them, I would still believe that what I saw of America from my father’s car—or see now from my own wandering path—is all there is to see. I.It is the very end of the 1960s. Scared and in over my head, I am a volunteer flying to California at the request of Cesar Chavez, a man I don’t know. His fledgling union is trying to raise wages for all farmworkers, but the growers have refused even to talk, and Cesar has enlisted public support by calling for a consumer boycott of grapes. In retaliation, agribusiness is using migrants from Mexico to break the strike, and Cesar has organized protest marches from both sides of the border.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "It was small consolation to me that other naked slaves would follow. I was alone by the Queen's coach, and I thought only of pleasing her, and of appearing as she wanted me to appear to others. I held my head up, I contracted my buttocks to hold in the painful phallus. And soon, as we passed before hundreds upon hundreds of soldiers, I thought again, 'I am her servant, her slave, and this is my life. I have no other.' "Perhaps the most excruciating part of the day for me was the villages. You have been through the villages. I had not. The only common people I had seen were in the kitchen. "But this day of military parade was also the opening of the fairs in the villages. The Queen visited each of several, and after that the fair would open. "There was a platform in the center of the square of each, and when the Queen went inside of the house of the Lord of the village to drink a cup of wine with him, I was left on display as she had told me I would be. "But I was not to stand gracefully as I might have hoped. And the villagers knew this, though I didn't. When we reached the first village, the Queen went away, and as soon as my feet hit the platform, a great roar went up from the crowd who knew they were to see something amusing. "I had my head down, glad of the opportunity to move the rigid muscles of my throat and shoulders. And I was quite astonished when Felix removed the phallus from my anus. Of course the crowd cheered at this. I was then made to kneel up, hands behind my neck on a turntable. "Felix operated it with his foot. And telling me to spread my legs wide, he turned the turntable. I was perhaps more afraid in these first few moments than ever before, but never once did the fear rising and trying to escape come to me. I was virtually helpless. Naked, a slave of the Queen, I was in the midst of hundreds of common people who would have overpowered me at once, and cheerfully for all the sport it would have given them. It was then that I realized escape was quite impossible. Any naked Prince or Princess fleeing the castle would have been apprehended by these villagers. They would have given no shelter. "Now Felix commanded me to show to the crowd all my private parts that were in the service of the Queen, and that I was her slave, and her animal. I did not understand these words, which were spoken ceremoniously. So he told me politely enough that I must part the cheeks of my buttocks as I bent over and display for them my open anus. Of course this was a symbolic gesture. It meant I was ever to be violated.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  When we began searching for the table with Bennett and the others, we found ourselves suddenly lost in a series of mirrored boxes and partitions which opened into each other. We kept walking into ourselves. As in a dream, none of the faces at the tables belonged to people we knew. We looked hard and with mounting panic. I felt I had been transported to some looking-glass world where, like the Red Queen, I would run and run and only wind up going backward. Bennett was nowhere. In a flash, I knew he had left with Marie and taken her home to bed. I was terrified. I’d finally provoked him into it. That was the end of me. I’d spend the rest of my lonely life husbandless, childless, and neglected. “Let’s go,” Adrian said. “They aren’t here. They’ve taken off.” “Maybe they couldn’t get a table and they’re waiting outside.” “We could look,” he said. But I knew the truth. I was abandoned. Bennett had left for good. At this very moment he was cupping Marie’s huge sallow ass. He was fucking her Freudian mind. On my first trip to Washington at the age of ten, I got separated from my family while touring the FBI Building. I got lost in the FBI Building, of all places. Bureau of Missing Persons. Send out alarm. This was at the absolute height of the McCarthy era and a tight-lipped FBI man was explaining various things about catching communists. I was dawdling before a glass case, dreaming into the fingerprint specimens, when the tour group rounded a corner and disappeared. I wandered about, gazing at my reflection in the exhibition cases and trying to keep down my terror. I would never be found. I was more elusive than the fingerprints of a gloved criminal. I would be diabolically interrogated by crew-cut FBI agents until I confessed that my parents were communists (they had been communists once, in fact) and we would all end our days like the Rosenbergs singing “God Bless America” in our damp cells and anticipating what it would be like to be electrocuted. At that point I began to scream. I screamed until the whole tour group doubled back and found me, right there—in a room full of clues. But now I couldn’t scream. And besides, the rock music was so loud that no one would have heard. I suddenly wanted Bennett as badly as I had wanted Adrian a few minutes before. And Bennett was gone. We left the discotheque and headed for Adrian’s car. A funny thing happened on the way to his pension. Or rather: ten funny things happened. We got lost ten times. And each of those times was unique—not just the same wrong turns over and over. Now that we were stuck with each other for eternity, fucking immediately didn’t seem quite as important. “I’m not going to tell you about all the other men I’ve fucked,” I said, being brave.

• From Querelle (1953)

  lOS I QUERELLE go on believing in his false naivete (while knowing Mario didn't believe in it for one minute) -to uphold the pretense that this was merely a joke, child's play, and looking the copper straight in the eye, Querelle undid the buttons: one, two, three. In a voice that he wanted to sound clear but that was vaguely excited he said: "You were right. Not bad." "You like it.". Querelle withdrew his hand. Still smiling. "I told you, I'm not interested in pricks. No matter what size they are." With one hand still on the sailor's shoulder, Mario thrust his other hand into his pocket and flipped his rod out into the open air. He stood there, legs apart, confronting the sailor who was looking at him and smiling. Quere11e whispered: "Not here. Isn't there some other place?'' Close to his ear, Quere11e heard the quiet noise the saliva was making in the detective's mouth. His moist lips were parting, perhaps in readiness for a kiss, the tongue ready to dart into an ear and to flicker about there .. They heard the s t eam whistle of a night train. Querelle listened to its rumbling, almost breath ing approach. The two men had arrived at the railroad embank ment. It was dark, but the cop's face had to be very close to his own. Again he heard that sharp little noise, now a little hissing and amplified by the freely flowing spittle. It seemed to him ]ike the mysterious preparation for an amorous debauch the likes of which he had never even imagined. He felt a little disquieted by his ability to distinguish such an intimate mani festation of Mario's, to thus perceive his innermost secrets. Even though he had moved his lips, and his tongue inside his mouth, in a completely natural fashion, it appeared to Querelle as if he were smacking his ]ips at the thought of the ensuing orgy. That quiet spittle-noise in Qucrelle's ear was enough to

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  As Zapata rides to his destiny, his wife hangs on to his boot, dragging in the dust, imploring him to stay home. Since I couldn’t yet admit to myself that I was more interested in going to sea and the revolution than in staying home as the mother or the wife, I just vowed silently that I would never become an obstacle to any man’s freedom. Even the dictionary defines adventurer as “a person who has, enjoys, or seeks adventures,” but adventuress is “a woman who uses unscrupulous means in order to gain wealth or social position.” When women did travel, they seemed to come to a bad end, from the real Amelia Earhart to the fictional Thelma and Louise. In much of the world to this day, a woman may be disciplined or even killed for dishonoring her family if she leaves her home without a male relative, or her country without a male guardian’s written permission. In Saudi Arabia, women are still forbidden to drive a car, even to the hospital in an emergency, much less for an adventure. During the democratic uprisings of the Arab Spring, both female citizens and foreign journalists paid the price of sexual assault for appearing in the public square. As novelist Margaret Atwood wrote to explain women’s absence from quest-for-identity novels, “there’s probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she’s likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.”3 The irony here is that thanks to molecular archaeology—which includes the study of ancient DNA to trace human movement over time—we now know that men have been the stay-at-homes, and women have been the travelers. The rate of intercontinental migration for women is about eight times that for men.4 However, these journeys have often been unchosen one-way trips in cultures that were patriarchal and patrilocal; that is, women were under male control and also went to live in their husbands’ households. In matrilocal cultures, men joined their wives’ families—in about a third of the world they still do—but with equal status, since those cultures are and almost never were matriarchal. In the face of all the dire and often accurate warnings of danger on the road for women, it took modern feminism to ask the rock-bottom question: Compared to what? Whether by dowry murders in India, honor killings in Egypt, or domestic violence in the United States, records show that women are most likely to be beaten or killed at home and by men they know. Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for women than the road. Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a woman will be a self-willed journey—and to be welcomed when she comes home. —AS YOU WILL SEE, this book is the story not of one or even several trips, but of decades of travel leading out from the hub of home. You might say it’s the story of a modern nomad.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  “O my loved Guide, who more than seven 6 times hast restored me to safety, and rescued from deep peril that stood before me, leave me not so undone,” I said, “and if to go farther be denied us, let us retrace our steps together rapidly.” And that Lord, who had led me thither, said to me: “Fear not, for our passage none can take from us: by Such has it been given to us. But thou, wait here for me; and comfort and feed thy wearied spirit with good hope: for I will not forsake thee in the low world.” Thus the gentle Father goes, and leaves me here, and I remain in doubt: for yes and no contend within my head. I could not hear that which was offered to them; but he had not long stood with them, when they all. vying with one another, rushed in

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  It was then that I knew I was losing my senses. I was down on my hands and knees, though I was not shackled, and running desperately to hide from their paddles. I struggled to get under the kitchen tables, and everywhere I sought a moment's rest, they sought me out, moving the tables and chairs if need be to get at my buttocks with their paddles. Of course if I tried to rise, they pushed me down. I was desperate. "I found myself scurrying to the Page and kissing his feet just as I had seen Prince Gerald do with the Queen. "But if he told the Queen, it was of no use to me. The next day I was shackled as before, and awaiting the boredom and restlessness of the same mistresses and masters. Sometimes passing me, they stuffed into my anus some bit of food rather than throw it away, carrots, other roots, whatever they thought liken to a penis. I was raped over and over by these things, and had to expel them with great effort. They would not have spared my mouth, I suppose, had they not been commanded to leave me gagged as all such slaves are gagged. "And whenever I caught a glimpse of a Page I found myself pleading with him by all my gestures and manner of groaning. "I had no real thoughts during this time. Perhaps I had begun to think of myself as the half human thing that they thought I was. I don't know. To them I was a disobedient Prince sent to them because I deserved it. Any abuse was their duty. If the flies were bad, they would paint my penis and balls with honey to attract them and think that very clever. "Much as I feared the leather whip handles of the stable boys forced up my anus, I came to look forward to being taken to the cleaner, cooler places in the stable. Those boys at least thought it quite marvelous that they had a real Prince to torment. They rode me quite long and hard, but it was better than the kitchen. "I don't know how long it went on. Every time they unshackled me I was terrified. They soon took to throwing about the refuse on the floor and making me gather it up as they chased me with their paddles. I had lost all sense of the wisdom of merely keeping still, and flustered and in panic I ran this way and that to finish the task as they spanked me. Prince Gerald had never been so frantic. "Of course I thought of him as I found myself doing this. And I thought bitterly, 'He is amusing the Queen in her chambers, and I am here in this filthy place.'