Loneliness

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 Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  “If you’re an organizer for Local 6,” the owner leaned across his desk, “you can punch in, but you may not punch out.” Ironic. He was afraid the union had sent me to organize his typesetters. I was afraid he’d find out I’d only recently learned to type. The foreman led me to a machine. “Here’s the manual. I don’t have time to train you now. Start typing this text. When it’s done, run it out and give it to the proofreaders in there. Pll show you the format codes later, or look them up. Got it?” I nodded. “Wait,” I stopped him, “how do I run it out?” He shook his head disgustedly. ““That’s what you got a manual for.” From where I typeset I could see four women working inside the proofreaders’ room. I could hear their laughter, easy and relaxed. The foreman poked his head in and said something I couldn’t hear. They broke off their conversation. One woman nodded. He left. Their laughter rose again. I wondered if men know that women talk differently among themselves. I guessed the same must be true for the Black and Latino workers too, when no whites were around. The women huddled to share a secret. I typed up the text and looked up the codes to run it out. I actually looked forward to being inside the proofreaders’ space for a moment—women’s space. The women stopped talking as I walked in. I held up the repros. “Put them over there,’ one of the women said. She didn’t look at me as she spoke. I sighed, dropped them in the basket, and left. As I Stone Butch Blues 261 walked away, I heard their conversation resume and their voices rise in laughter once again. I only lasted one shift in that shop. But New York City was chock full of typesetting shops that ran around the clock. They were always hiring on third shift—lobster shift. After faking my way into enough shops and learning a bit at each, I soon realized I wasn't bluffing any longer. I had become a typesetter. It wasn’t a bad rhythm of life. For six or eight months out of the year I earned top dollar. I loved the leisurely predawn ride home, traveling in the opposite direction to packed rush hour trains and crowded streets. But it was dark when I got up, and I began to feel like a mole. Just when I thought Id lose my sanity, it was summertime— layoffs. I became eligible for the maximum unemployment benefits. During the summer I explored the city. My biggest problem was loneliness. I didn’t have anyone to talk to all summer long. By fall I longed for casual conversation between co-workers. Bill pounded the lunchroom table for emphasis. I read the newspaper. “Isn’t that the truth?” Bill asked me. 262 = Leslie Feinberg

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The moments in which we feel recognized and appreciated are fleeting. People can largely be indifferent to our fate, as they must deal with their own problems. There are even some who are downright hostile and disrespectful to us. How do we handle those moments when we feel psychologically alone, or even abandoned? We can double our efforts to get attention and notice, but this can exhaust our energy and it can often have the opposite effect—people who try too hard seem desperate and repulse the attention they want. We simply cannot rely on others to give us constant validation, and yet we crave it. Facing this dilemma from early childhood on, most of us come up with a solution that works quite well: we create a self, an image of ourselves that comforts us and makes us feel validated from within . This self is composed of our tastes, our opinions, how we look at the world, what we value. In building this self-image, we tend to accentuate our positive qualities and explain away our flaws. We cannot go too far in this, for if our self-image is too divorced from reality, other people will make us aware of the discrepancy, and we will doubt ourselves. But if it is done properly, in the end we have a self that we can love and cherish. Our energy turns inward. We become the center of our attention. When we experience those inevitable moments when we are alone or not feeling appreciated, we can retreat to this self and soothe ourselves. If we have moments of doubt and depression, our self-love raises us up, makes us feel worthy and even superior to others. This self-image operates as a thermostat, helping us to regulate our doubts and insecurities. We are no longer completely dependent on others for attention and recognition. We have self-esteem . This idea might seem strange. We generally take this self-image completely for granted, like the air we breathe. It operates on a largely unconscious basis. We don’t feel or see the thermostat as it operates. The best way to literally visualize this dynamic is to look at those who lack a coherent sense of self—people we shall call deep narcissists. In constructing a self that we can hold on to and love, the key moment in its development occurs between the ages of two and five years old. As we slowly separate from our mother, we face a world in which we cannot get instant gratification. We also become aware that we are alone and yet dependent on our parents for survival. Our answer is to identify with the best qualities of our parents—their strength, their ability to soothe us—and incorporate these qualities into ourselves. If our parents encourage us in our first efforts at independence, if they validate our need to feel strong and recognize our unique qualities, then our self-image takes root, and we can slowly build upon it.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Miss Moote was standing outside the door. She smiled at me and put her hand on my shoulder. “You OK?” she asked. “Sure,” I said. “This will blow over,” she assured me. I made a pleading face. “Let me just see Mrs. Noble and Miss Candi, please? Then Pll go.” Miss Moore nodded. I wanted to talk to her so badly, but I felt as though I was standing in a boat that was drifting away from everyone. I said goodbye and walked away. Mts. Noble was marking test papers. She looked up as I came into the classroom. “I heard,” she said, and continued to correct papers. I sat on top of a desk in front of hers. “I came to say goodbye.” Mts. Noble looked up and took off her glasses. “You're quitting school over this?” I shrugged. “They suspended me, but I’m not coming back.” “They suspended you? Over the lunchroom incident?” Mrs. Noble rubbed her eyes and slipped her glasses back on. “Do you think I did something wrong?” She sat back in her chair. “When you do something out of conviction, my dear, it should be because you believe it’s the right thing to do. If you look for approval from everyone, you'll never be able to.act,” I felt criticized. “I’m not asking everybody, I was just asking you,” I sulked. Mts. Noble shook her head. “Just think about coming back. You must go to college.” I shrugged. “I’m never gonna finish high school. I’m going into the factories.” “You need skills, even to be a laborer.” I shrugged. “I can’t afford college, that’s one thing. My parents aren’t going to spend a dime on me ot co-sign a loan either.” She ran her hands through her hair. I noticed for the first time how grey it was. “What do you want to do with your life?” she asked me. I thought about it. “I want a good job, a union job. I'd really like to get into the steel plant, or Chevy.” “T guess it wasn’t fair of me to want you to want mote.” “Like what?” I said, angry that I was now a disappointment to her, too. “I could see you becoming a great American poet, or a fiery labor leader, or discovering the cure for cancer.” She took off her glasses and wiped them with a Kleenex. “I wanted you to help change the world.” I laughed. She had no idea how powerless I really was. “I can’t change anything,” I told her. I toyed with telling her what had happened on the football field, but I just couldn’t find the words to begin. Stone Butch Blues 45 “Do you know what it takes to change the world, Jess?” I shook my head. “You have to figure out what you really believe in and then find other people who feel the same way. The only thing you have to do alone is to decide what’s important to you.”

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Old Man Martin was retired. He sat in a lawn chair on his porch listening to the McCarthy hearings on his radio. It was turned up so loud you could hear it all the way down the block. “Gotta watch out,” he’d tell me as I passed his house, “communists could be anywhere. Anywhere.” I'd nod solemnly and run off to play. 10 Leslie Feinberg But Old Man Martin and I shared something in common. The radio was my best friend, too. “The Jack Benny Show” and “Fibber McGee and Molly” made me laugh, even when I didn’t know what was so funny. “The Shadow” and “The Whistler’ chilled me. Perhaps outside these projects working families already had televisions, but not us. The streets of the project weren't even paved—just gravel and giant Lincoln Logs to mark the parking. Very few new things came down our road. Ponies pulled the carts of the ice man and the knife sharpener. On Saturday they brought the ponies without the carts and sold rides for a penny. A penny also bought a chunk from the ice man—chipped off with his ice pick. The ice was dense and slick and sparkled like a cold diamond that might never melt. When a television set first appeared in the projects, it was in the living room of the McKensies’. All the children in the neighborhood begged our parents to let us go watch “Captain Midnight” on the McKensies’ new television. But most of us were not allowed in their home. Although it was 1955, the neighborhood still had some invisible war zones from a fierce strike that had been settled in 1949, the year I was born. “Mac” McKensie had been a scab. Just the word itself was enough to make me shy away from their house. You could still see traces of that word on the front of their coal bin, even though it had been painted over in a slightly different shade of green. Years later, fathers still argued about the strike overt kitchen tables and backyard barbecue grills. I overheard descriptions of such bloody strike battles, I thought WWII had been fought at the plant. At night when we’d drive my father to his shift, I used to crouch down on the backseat of the car and peek past the plant gates out over the now quiet fields of combat. There were also gangs in the projects, and the kids whose parents had scabbed during the strike made up a small but feared pack. “Hey, pansy! Are you a boy or a girl?” There was no way to avoid them in the small planet of the projects. Their sing-song taunts stayed with me long after I’d passed by. The world judged me harshly and so I moved, or was pushed, toward solitude.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  One at a time I broke the shells of the peanuts. I threw some of them to the ducks and ate the others myself. I felt more alone and afraid than ever before. 239 IT SEEMED TO BE A Saturday morning like any other. One day had become so much like the next. Each hour dragged so slowly that I didn’t pay attention as months turned into years. As I made myself coffee, I watched a blue jay fight with a starling over the crumbs in the bird feeder. Neither noticed the orange-marmalade cat crouched below them, ready to spring. I took my time in the shower, trying to scrub away the grime of isolation with hot, soapy water. Loneliness had become an environment—the air I breathed, the spatial dimension in which I was trapped. I sat in a boat on a deathly calm sea, waiting for a breeze to fill my sails. And so it never occurred to me my life might change again dramatically that day. It was quite simple, really. I drew one cc of hormones into a syringe, lifted it above my naked thigh—and then paused. My arm felt restrained by an unseen hand. No matter how I tried I could not sink that needle into my quadriceps as I'd done hundreds of times before. I stood up and looked in the bathroom mirror. The depth of sadness in my eyes frightened me. I lathered my morning beard stubble, scraped it clean with a razor, and splashed cold water on my face. The stubble still felt rough. As much as I loved my beard as part of my body, I felt trapped behind it. What I saw reflected in the mirror was not a man, but I couldn’t recognize the he-she. My face no longer revealed the contrasts of my gender. I could see my passing self, but even I could no longer see the more complicated me beneath my surface. I stared far back into my past and remembered the child who couldn’t be catalogued by Sears. I saw her standing in front of her own mirror, in her father’s suit, asking me if I was the person she would grow up to become. Yes, I answered her. And I thought how brave she was to have begun this journey, to have withstood the towering judgments. But who was I now—woman or man? I fought long and hard to be included as a woman among women, but I always felt so excluded by my differences. I hadn’t just believed that passing would hide me. I hoped that it would allow me to express the part of myself that didn’t seem to be woman. I didn’t get to explore being a he-she, though. I simply became a he—a man without a past. Who was I now—woman or man? That question could never be answered as long as those were the only choices; it could never be answered if it had to be asked.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  named. New scenery shot past my window. The earth emerged—wooded, bleak, and bare. A long ride lay ahead of me. “Ts anyone sitting here?’ a woman asked me. I shook my head. She put her luggage in the rack overhead. A little girl peeked around the woman’s legs at me. “I’m Joan, and this is my daughter Amy.” Amy stared at me. I nodded and smiled. “I’m Jess.” I turned and looked out the window. I wanted to be left alone to think and to wonder. Amy curled up on her mother’s lap. “Tell me a story.” Joan smiled and leaned her head back against the seat. “Once up a time ...” She wove a story about a little girl who traveled out into the world to find the sorcerer who would tell her what she was supposed to do with her life. But on the way the girl was confronted by a fire-breathing dragon who blocked her path. She was very frightened by the dragon. “What shall I do?” the girl cried out. Suddenly she noticed a huge boulder balanced on the cliff above. If she could push the rock, it would fall and kill the dragon. But how could she get up there? The girl called out to an eagle, “Brother Eagle, please help me slay the dragon!” And the eagle swooped down and lifted the girl up to the cliff. The dragon saw the boulder falling, but it was too late. When the rock Stone Butch Blues 245 crushed the dragon, it disappeared in a cloud of smoke. The girl was very happy, but she was afraid the whole mess had made her late on her journey and now she’d never find the sorcerer. That evening she stopped and camped under a weeping willow beside a river. She started a small fire to cook her hot dogs and went into the forest to find more wood. When she returned, she found the sorcerer sitting by her fire, toasting marshmallows. She knew it was the sorcerer because he was wearing a tall pointed cap with stars and moons on it. So she sat down and asked him, “Mr. Sorcerer, please tell me what ’'m supposed to do with my life.’ And the sorcerer smiled and told her, “You ate supposed to slay a dragon.” Amy smiled at her mother and curled against her breast. “Mommy, is that a girl or a man?” she asked, looking up at Joan. Joan flashed me an apologetic expression and turned back to Amy. “That’s Jess,” she said. “Can I get you anything from the café car?” I asked Joan as I stood up and inched past them both. She shook her head. I bought a bottle of pop and a deck of cards and sat in the café car and played solitaire. When I came back to my seat, Joan and Amy were gone. They must have gotten off at Rochester. I relished the privacy. 246 = Leslie Feinberg

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I was making a mental note of this when Butch Al’s shadow fell across me. The bouncer stood between us and the drag queens shooed her into the backroom. It happened in a flash, but a glimpse of this woman had floored me. Butch Al was a glance at power, a memory I was afraid to hang onto and afraid to let go of. I sat trembling at the bar long after the momentary excitement had died down for everyone else. I felt exiled to the front of the bar, more lonely than before I came in, because now I knew what I wasi't a part of. A red light flashed over the bar. Mona grabbed my hand and dragged me through the backroom into the women’s bathroom. She flipped the toilet seat down and told me to climb up on it. She closed the stall door partway and said to stay there and be quiet. The cops were here. So there I crouched. For a long time. It wasn’t until I frightened a femme half to death when she opened the stall door that I discovered the police had left long ago with their payoff from the owner. No one remembered that the kid was hidden in the bathroom. As I emerged from the john, everyone in the backroom had a good laugh at my expense. I retreated to the front bar again and nursed a beer. Later I felt a hand on my arm. Here was that beautiful woman I had asked to dance. This was Butch Al’s femme. “C’mon honey, come sit with us,” she offered. “No, ?m OK out here,” I said as bravely as I could. But she put her arm around me gently and guided me off the bar stool. “C’mon, join us. It’s OK. Al won’t hurt you,” she reassured me. “Her bark is worse than her bite.” Stone Butch Blues 25 I doubted that. Especially when Butch Al stood up as I approached their table. She was a big woman. I don’t know how tall she really was. I was only a kid. But she towered over me in height and stature. I immediately loved the strength in her face. The way her jaw set. The anger in her eyes. The way she carried her body. Her body both emerged from her sports coat and was hidden. Curves and creases. Broad back, wide neck. Large breasts bound tight. Folds of white shirt and tie and jacket. Hips concealed. She looked me up and down. I widened my stance. She took that in. Her mouth refused to smile, but it seemed her eyes did. She extended a beefy hand. I took it. The solidness of her handshake caught me by surprise. She strengthened her grip, I responded in kind. I was relieved I wasn’t wearing a ring. Her clasp tightened, so did mine. Finally she smiled. “There’s hope for you,” she said. I flushed at how gratefully I embraced her words.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  how’s my driving? (1989) I steer the Van down the Mall dividing the up from the down of Commonwealth Avenue, its walkway littered with statues of the unknown rich—a man in a sailor’s hat looking over a bronze sea; a man with one hand in his coat pocket, fingering his coins forever. Past the benches my father haunts, three a.m., the radar begins to hum. What color was his blanket yesterday? Olive drab? Maroon? Last night it snowed, you could follow his footprints from his bench to the church overhang, until the snow filled them. I drive slowly past a blanket shaped like a man—here is a man, shaped like a blanket, shaped like a box, shaped like a bench. Easy to miss. If this is my father, if I leave a sandwich beside his sleeping body, does this become a family meal? Is this bench now our dinner table? Are we inside again? Is this what it means to be holding it together? Am I coping? How’s my driving? It’s just Jeff and me tonight, someone didn’t show. Shaved head, weight lifter, ex-Marine—Jeff has been working with the homeless since he quit drinking a year ago. His girlfriend didn’t follow him into the land of sobriety. This causes Jeff a lot of turmoil. His anger, though, can be an asset on the Van. More than once I see him slam a homeless guy against a wall who’d threatened us. A hands-on kind of counselor, a cowboy, a terminator. It’s against policy but there’s something refreshing about it, once in a while. Good to have him on your side. Aside from these infrequent outbursts he possesses the gentle demeanor that sometimes trails the newly sober, that deep acceptance that comes with realizing how badly you’d fucked up your life. Yet he’s still drifting dangerously down his own river of rage. I hop the Van over the curb into Boston Common, which isn’t legal, but the cops ignore us. On the Common a man’s allowed to graze a flock of sheep, goats, cows, whatever, this is in the articles of incorporation from 1634, this is the original purpose for this public land. But that same man, that shepherd, is not allowed to sleep. If the shepherd falls asleep he can be arrested. The sheep may all be asleep but the man must watch them sleep. Russell walks the periphery. Plaid suitcoat, red shirt, polka-dot tie, white shoes. Hard to miss. He’s become our favorite person lately (Who is your favorite bum?). Tonight he sports a captain’s hat. My recent coup was to offer him a stick of gum and have him accept it. This after three years of seeing him sleeping out, three years of him telling us he was just on his way home, only to find him later in a doorway on Newbury. Dear Nick…what does it feel like…scooping bodies off our filthy streets…to carry them to the well run Pine Street Palace?

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  On the stoop of a dentist’s office, across the street from a shuttered Friendly’s, we unwrapped our sandwiches. Warm cellophane crinkled around our hands. We chewed, stared into the restaurant windows, where a poster of a sundae advertised a ghastly green “Colossal Leprechaun Mint Boat” from last March. I held my sandwich close, letting the steam blur my vision. “Do you think we’ll still hang out when we’re a hundred?” I said without thinking. He flung the wrapper, which caught the wind and blew back atop the bush beside him. Right away I regretted asking. Swallowing, he said, “People don’t live to a hundred.” He ripped open a packet of ketchup, squeezed a thin red line over my sandwich. “True.” I nodded. Then I heard the laughter. It came from a house on the street behind us. The clear voices of children, two, maybe three, then a man’s—a father? They were playing in the backyard. Not a game, exactly, but an embodiment of vague excitement, the kind known only to very young children, where delight rushes through them simply by running across an empty field not yet recognized as a tiny backyard in a shitty part of town. From their shrill cries, they were no older than six, an age where one could be ecstatic just by moving. They were little bells struck to singing, it seems, by air itself. “That’s enough. That’s enough for tonight,” the man said, at which the voices immediately faded. The sound of a screen door slamming. The quiet flooded back. Trevor beside me, his head in his hands. We rode home, the streetlights here and there above us. That day was a purple day—neither good nor bad, but something we passed through. I pedaled faster, I moved, briefly unmoored. Trevor, beside me, was singing the 50 Cent song. His voice sounded oddly young, as if it had come back from a time before I met him. As if I could turn and find a boy with a denim jacket laundered by his mom, detergent wafting up and through his hair still blond above baby-plump cheeks, training wheels rattling on the pavement. I joined him. “Many men, many, many, many, many men.” We sang, nearly shouting the lyrics, the wind clipping at our voices. They say a song can be a bridge, Ma. But I say it’s also the ground we stand on. And maybe we sing to keep ourselves from falling. Maybe we sing to keep ourselves. “Wish death ’pon me. Lord I don’t cry no more, don’t look to the sky no more. Have mercy on me.” In the blue living rooms we passed, the football game was dying down. “Blood in my eye dawg and I can’t see.” In the blue living rooms, some people won and some people lost. In this way, autumn passed. —

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  If she was going to recommend an action that might meet some resistance, she would couch it as one of his own ideas from the past, but with a slight modification of her own. She could decipher the meaning of his various types of smiles, knowing when she could go further with her idea and when to stop in her tracks. And she made certain to confirm his idealized image of himself as the noble warrior fighting on behalf of the disenfranchised. To other courtiers, she presented herself in the most nonthreatening manner, never making a show of her influence over her boss and applying the same type of charm to everyone who crossed her path. In this way she made it hard to feel threatened or envious of her powers. This is a role you might want to consider playing in the court because of the power it brings, but to pull it off you will have to be a great reader of people, sensitive to their nonverbal cues. You want to be able to mirror their moods, not just their ideas. This will cast a spell over them and lower their resistance. With leaders, you must be aware of their idealized opinion of themselves and always confirm it in some way, or even encourage them to live up to it. Those on top are lonelier and more insecure than you imagine, and they will lap this up. As mentioned before, overt flattery can be dangerous because people can see through it, but even if they see through your mirroring, they will remain charmed and want more. The Favorite and the Punching Bag: These two types occupy the highest and lowest rungs of the court. Every king or queen must have his or her Favorite within the court. As opposed to the other types, whose power generally depends on efficiency and demonstrations of abject loyalty, the Favorite’s rise in power is often based on cultivating a more personal, friend-like relationship. Early on, they act relaxed and chummy with the leader, without seeming disrespectful. Many leaders are secretly dying to not have to be so formal and in control. Sometimes leaders who are lonely will pick out one person to occupy this position. With the Favorite, they will gladly share secrets and bestow favors. This, of course, will stir up the envy of other courtiers. This position is fraught with danger. First, it depends on the friendly feelings of leaders, and such feelings are inevitably fickle. People are more sensitive to the words or actions of friends, and if they feel somehow disappointed or betrayed in any way, they can go from liking to hating the former friend. Second, the Favorite receives so much privileged treatment that they often become arrogant and entitled. Leaders might tire of their spoiled behavior.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  had his own issues—he was always falling in love with the people closest to Shelley, first Shelley’s sister, then Shelley’s first wife, and finally Mary herself, whom he tried to seduce. But that had been years ago, they remained good friends, and as a lawyer Hogg could be of some help to Jane. Mary decided to stay in Italy. She had hardly any friends left, but the Hunts were still in Italy. Much to her dismay, however, Leigh Hunt had become surprisingly cold to her. In this, her most vulnerable moment, he had apparently lost all sympathy for her, and she could not figure out why. This only added to her misery. Certainly he must know how deeply she had loved her husband and the depth of her mourning? She was not one to show her emotions as openly as Jane, but deep inside she suffered more than anyone. Other former friends were now acting cold as well. Only Lord Byron stood by her, and they grew closer. Soon it became apparent that Shelley’s parents, who had been shocked by their son’s libertine ways, would not recognize Percy as their grandson, certainly as long as he was in the care of Mary. There would be no money for her. She thought the only answer was to return to London. Perhaps if the Shelley family met Percy and saw what a devoted mother she was, they might change their minds. She wrote to Jane and to Hogg for their advice. The two of them had now become close friends. Hogg seemed to think she should wait before returning; his letter was remarkably cold. Here was yet another person who had suddenly become distant. But it was the response of Jane that most surprised her. She advised giving up Percy and not coming to England. As Mary tried to explain how impossible that would be for her emotionally, Jane became even more adamant in her opinion. She expressed this in practical terms—Mary would not be welcomed in London, the Shelley family would turn against her even more—but it seemed so unsympathetic. In the months together in Italy after the deaths of their husbands, they had grown quite close. Jane was the last real link to Mary’s husband left in her life. She had forgiven Jane for any indiscretions with her husband. Losing Jane’s friendship would be like experiencing another death. She decided she would in fact return to London with her son and rekindle the friendship with Jane. Mary returned to London in August of 1823, only to find that she had become quite a celebrity. Frankenstein had been turned into a play that emphasized the horror elements in the book. And it was quite a sensation. The story and the name “Frankenstein” now had seeped into popular culture. Mary’s father, who had become a bookseller and publisher, came out with a new edition of

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  be more than a statement to the larger society, there must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point.” The movement was not about integrating blacks into the values of American society but about actively altering those values at their root. He would add to the civil rights movement the need to address poverty in inner cities and to protest the Vietnam War. On April 4, 1967, he expressed this widening of the struggle in a speech that got lots of attention, almost all negative. Even his most ardent supporters criticized it. Including the Vietnam War would only alienate the public from the cause of civil rights, they said. It would anger the Johnson administration, whose support they depended upon. It was not part of his mandate to speak so broadly. He had never felt so alone, so attacked by his many critics. By early 1968 his depression had become deeper than ever. He felt the end was near—some among his many enemies were going to kill him for all that he had said and done. He was exhausted by the tension and felt spiritually at a loss. In March of that year, a pastor in Memphis, Tennessee, invited King to his city, hoping he could help support a strike by black sanitation workers, who had been treated horribly. There had been marches, boycotts, and protests, and the police had responded brutally. The situation was explosive. King put them off—he felt depleted. But as so often happened in these circumstances, he realized it was his duty to do what he could, and so he agreed. On March 18 he addressed an enormous crowd in Memphis, and their enthusiastic response cheered him up. He heard that voice once again supporting and urging him forward. Memphis would have to be a key part of his mission. For the next few weeks he kept returning to Memphis to lend his support and assistance, against the fierce resistance of the local authorities. On Wednesday evening, April 4, he addressed another crowd: “We got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. . . . Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. . . . But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.” The speech left him revitalized and in a good mood. The next day he expressed some concern about an upcoming march that could turn violent but said fear should not stop them from proceeding. “I’d rather be dead than afraid,” he told an aide. That evening, he dressed and prepared for a dinner at a restaurant with his aides, and

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  In Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, the young protagonist, Franck, witnesses an older man, Michel, drowning his boyfriend in a lake that serves as a local cruising spot. Shortly thereafter, he begins an affair with Michel. After the boyfriend’s body is found, the gay community that exists along the shore is shaken, thrown into emotional turmoil while simultaneously maintaining its collective routines. As an enterprising inspector begins to sniff around for answers, Franck finds himself lying for his new lover and trying to get closer to him. Franck’s decision to stay with the handsome, magnetic murderer is only a few notches exaggerated from a pretty relatable problem: an inability to find logical footing when you’re being knocked around by waves of lust, love, loneliness. Michel does not have the campy fabulousness of so many queer villains, and is in many ways far more sinister. He is attractive, charismatic, and morally empty. We are given almost no clues about his backstory, his murderous motivations. There is a question of representation tied up in the anguish around the queer villain; when so few gay characters appear on-screen, their disproportionate villainy is—obviously—suspect. It tells a single story, to paraphrase Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and creates real-life associations of evil and depravity. It is not incorrect to tell an artist that there is responsibility tangled up in whom you choose to make villains, but it is also not a simple matter. As it turns out, queer villains become far more interesting among other gay characters, both within a specific project or universe and the zeitgeist at large. They become one star in a larger constellation; they are put in context. And that’s pretty exciting, even liberating; by expanding representation, we give space to queers to be—as characters, as real people—human beings. They don’t have to be metaphors for wickedness and depravity or icons of conformity and docility.11 They can be what they are. We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people.12 They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough. Toward the end of Stranger by the Lake, the police inspector confronts Franck as he leaves the beach for the day. Franck is, literally, trapped in the beam of the officer’s headlights, and as the conversation progresses the metaphor is sharpened even more. “Don’t you find it odd we’ve only just found the body, and two days later everyone’s back cruising like nothing happened?” the officer asks him. Later in this scene, Franck will be visibly overcome with grief as the officer asks him to have compassion for the dead man, begs him to have a sense of self-preservation.13 But even in his grief, he is clear-eyed. “We can’t stop living,” he says.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Moscow with the other children. Only Anton would stay to finish his studies and get his diploma. He was charged with selling all of the remaining family belongings and sending the money to Moscow as soon as possible. The former boarder, now owner of the house, gave Anton a corner of one room to live in, and so at the age of sixteen, with no money of his own and no family to look after him, Anton was suddenly left to fend for himself in Taganrog. Anton had never really been alone before. His family had been his whole life, for better or worse. Now it was as if the bottom had dropped out. He had no one to turn to for help in any way. He blamed his father for this miserable fate, for being trapped in Taganrog. One day he felt angry and bitter, the next day depressed. But soon it became clear that he had no time for such sentiments. He had no money or resources, and yet somehow he had to survive. So he hired himself out as a tutor to as many families as possible. When they went on vacation he would often go hungry for days. His one jacket was threadbare; he had no galoshes for the heavy rains. He felt ashamed when he entered people’s houses, shivering and his feet all wet. But at least he was now able to support himself. He had decided to become a doctor. He had a scientific frame of mind, and doctors made a good living. To get into medical school he would have to study much harder. Frequenting the town library, the only place he could work in peace and quiet, he began to also browse the literature and philosophy sections, and soon he felt his mind soaring far beyond Taganrog. With books, he no longer felt so trapped. At night, he returned to his corner of a room to write stories and sleep. He had no privacy, but he could keep his corner neat and tidy, free of the usual disorder of the Chekhov household. He had finally begun to settle down, and new thoughts and emotions came to him. Work was no longer something he dreaded; he loved absorbing his mind in his studies, and tutoring had made him feel proud and dignified—he could take care of himself. Letters came from his family—Alexander ranting and complaining about their father making everyone miserable again; Mikhail, the youngest son, feeling worthless and depressed. Anton wrote back to Alexander: stop obsessing over our father and start taking care of yourself. He wrote to Mikhail: “Why do you refer to yourself as my ‘worthless, insignificant little brother’? Do you know where you should be aware of your worthlessness? Before God, perhaps . . . but not before people. Among people you should be aware of your worth.” Even Anton was surprised by the new tone he was taking in these letters.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  As Humphrey later wrote, “He’d come on just like a tidal wave sweeping all over the place. He went through walls. He’d come through a door and he’d take the whole room over.” Second, he had such invaluable information to share. He taught Humphrey all of the intricacies of Senate procedure and the knowledge he had accrued about the psychological weaknesses of various senators through close observation. He had become the greatest vote counter in the history of the Senate, able to predict the results of almost any Senate vote with astounding accuracy. He shared with Humphrey his vote-counting method. Finally, he taught Humphrey the power he could have by compromising, by being more pragmatic and less idealistic. He would share with him stories about FDR, Humphrey’s hero. When Johnson was in the House of Representatives, he had become close friends with the president. FDR, according to Johnson, was a consummate politician who knew how to get things done by retreating tactically and even compromising. The subtext here was that Johnson was really a closet liberal who also idolized FDR and who wanted just as much as Humphrey to pass a civil rights bill. They were both on the same side, fighting for the same noble causes. Working with Johnson, there was no limit to how high Humphrey could rise within the Senate and beyond. As Johnson had correctly guessed, Humphrey had presidential ambitions. Johnson himself could never become president, or so he said to Humphrey, because the nation was not ready for a president from the South. But he could help Humphrey get there. Together they would make an unbeatable team. What sealed the deal for Humphrey, however, was how Johnson proceeded to make his life easier within the Senate. Johnson talked to his fellow southern Democrats about Humphrey’s intelligence and humor, how they had misread him as a man. Having softened them up in this way, Johnson then reintroduced Humphrey to these senators, who found him charming. Most important of all, he got Russell to change his mind—and Russell could move mountains. Now that he was sharing drinks with the more powerful senators, Humphrey’s loneliness faded away. He felt compelled to return the favor and to get many northern liberals to change their minds about Johnson, whose influence was now beginning to spread like an invisible gas. In 1952 the Republicans swept into power with the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president, taking in the process control of the Senate and the House. One of the casualties in the election was Ernest McFarland of Arizona, the former Democratic leader in the Senate. Now that the leadership position was vacant, the scrambling for his replacement began. Johnson suggested that Russell himself take the position, but Russell declined. He could have more power operating behind the scenes. Instead he told Johnson he should be the next leader, and Russell could make it happen. Johnson, acting surprised, said he

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Here I was with Grandma and Ralph, staying up one hour later than I would the rest of the century-long week. Little Joe falls in love with a schoolteacher who comes past the Ponderosa in a buggy. He kisses her a long one, it stretches out forever in the silence of the living room. There isn’t a sound from behind me, on the couch. No one is moving while the kiss is going on. It’s horrible. I look around the room, at the pictures that cover every inch of wall space, my aunts and uncles and their families, framed sayings from the olden days, plaques with jokes about outhouses, a pair of flying ceramic ducks with orange beaks and feet, and on and on. Too much to look at. The pecking-hen salt and pepper shakers, the donkey with a dead plant coming out of his back, the stacks of old magazines under tables and on the seats of chairs. Underneath me are three scatter rugs, converging their corners in a lump under my back. Rag rugs, one of them made from bread wrappers. Hoss Cartwright saves the schoolteacher when her horse shies and now she’s in love with him. Little Joe tries to punch Hoss out. Behind me my grandmother’s knitting needles click together in a sad and empty way, Ralph’s breathing is audible over the scratch of scissor blades on stone. In the dim circle of light that I lay in, my head cushioned on an Arkansas Razorback pillow, I feel completely separate from them because of the simple fact that in seven days I will be rescued, removed from this terrible lonely place and put back in the noisy house I came from. It occurs to me that Grandma and Ralph have nothing, they don’t even enjoy Bonanza all that much, they just turned it on because my mom told them to let me watch it. There can’t be anything for them to enjoy, with their long empty days, full of curled-up old ladies and dirty sheep. They don’t even drink pop. I am crying on the floor, the tears go sideways and land coldly in my ears or on the velveteen pillow. I can’t bear, suddenly, the way the television sends out its sad blue light, making the edges of the room seem darker. A coffee can covered with contact paper holds red, white, and blue Fourth of July flowers, taken from a dead person. I wish suddenly that my grandma was dead, so she wouldn’t have to knit that afghan anymore. The rest of the year, while I’m gone back home and am playing with my friends, this is where my grandma is, her needles going, her teeth in the bathroom in a plastic bowl. My ears are swimming pools, and I feel trapped suddenly inside the small circle of light in the center of the room.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  She came to work, and she did her work, and she left. One could not imagine what she was thinking as she marched so grimly down the halls, her head tied up in a rag, a bucket and a mop in her hands. Elizabeth thought that she must once have been very rich, and had lost her money; and she felt for her, as one fallen woman for another, a certain kinship. A cup of coffee together, as day was breaking, became in time their habit. They sat together in the coffee shop, which was always empty when they arrived and was crowded fifteen minutes later when they left, and had their coffee and doughnuts before they took the underground uptown. While they had their coffee, and on the ride uptown, they talked, principally about Florence, how badly people treated her, and how empty her life was now that her husband was dead. He had adored her, she told Elizabeth, and satisfied her every whim, but he had tended to irresponsibility. If she had told him once, she had told him a hundred times: ‘Frank, you better take out life insurance.’ But he had thought—and wasn’t it just like a man!—that he would live for ever. Now here she was, a woman getting along in years, forced to make her living among all the black scum of this wicked city. Elizabeth, a little astonished at the need for confession betrayed by this proud woman, listened, nevertheless, with great sympathy. She was very grateful for Florence’s interest. Florence was so much older and seemed so kind. It was no doubt this, Florence’s age and kindness, that led Elizabeth, with no premeditation, to take Florence into her confidence. Looking back, she found it hard to believe that she could have been so desperate, or so childish; though, again, on looking back, she was able to see clearly what she then so incoherently felt: how much she needed another human being, somewhere, who knew the truth about her. Florence had often said how glad she would be to make the acquaintance of little Johnny; she was sure, she said, that any child of Elizabeth’s must be a wonderful child. On a Sunday near the end of that summer, Elizabeth dressed him in his best clothes and took him to Florence’s house. She was oddly and fearfully depressed that day; and John was not in a good mood. She found herself staring at him darkly, as though she were trying to read his future in his face. He would grow big one day, he would talk, and he would ask her questions.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  There were personal stories too. Like the time she told of how you were born, of the white American serviceman deployed on a navy destroyer in Cam Ranh Bay. How Lan met him wearing her purple áo dài, the split sides billowing behind her under the bar lights as she walked. How, by then, she had already left her first husband from an arranged marriage. How, as a young woman living in a wartime city for the first time with no family, it was her body, her purple dress, that kept her alive. As she spoke, my hand slowed, then stilled. I was engrossed in the film playing across the apartment walls. I had forgotten myself into her story, had lost my way, willingly, until she reached back and swatted my thigh. “Hey, don’t you sleep on me now!” But I wasn’t asleep. I was standing next to her as her purple dress swayed in the smoky bar, the glasses clinking under the scent of motor oil and cigars, of vodka and gunsmoke from the soldiers’ uniforms. “Help me, Little Dog.” She pressed my hands to her chest. “Help me stay young, get this snow off of my life—get it all off my life.” I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong. The room filled and refilled with our voices as the snow fell from her head, the hardwood around my knees whitening as the past unfolded around us. — And then there was the school bus. That morning, like all mornings, no one sat next to me. I pressed myself against the window and filled my vision with the outside, mauve with early dark: the Motel 6, the Kline’s Laundromat, not yet opened, a beige and hoodless Toyota stranded in a front yard with a tire swing half tilted in dirt. As the bus sped up, bits of the city whirled by like objects in a washing machine. All around me the boys jostled each other. I felt the wind from their quick-jerked limbs behind my neck, their swooping arms and fists displacing the air. Knowing the face I possess, its rare features in these parts, I pushed my head harder against the window to avoid them. That’s when I saw a spark in the middle of a parking lot outside. It wasn’t until I heard their voices behind me that I realized the spark came from inside my head. That someone had shoved my face into the glass. “Speak English,” said the boy with a yellow bowl cut, his jowls flushed and rippling. The cruelest walls are made of glass, Ma. I had the urge to break through the pane and leap out the window.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  at Castel Sant’Angelo. For one long year, in a small and windowless cell, she endured her loneliness and the endless tortures devised by the Borgias. Her health deteriorated and she seemed destined to die in prison, defiant to the end, but the chivalric French captain Yves d’Allegre had fallen under her spell. He persisted in demanding, in the name of the French king, to have her freed, and he finally succeeded, getting her safe passage to Florence. In retirement from public life, Caterina began to receive letters from men from all parts of Europe. Some had seen her over the years; most had only heard of her. They obsessed over her story, confessed their love, and begged for some memento, some relic to worship. One man who had caught a glimpse of her when she had first come to Rome wrote to her, “If I sleep, it seems that I am with you; if I eat, I leave my food and talk to you. . . . You are engraved in my heart.” Weakened by her year in prison, the countess died in 1509. • • • Interpretation: In Caterina Sforza’s time, the roles that a woman could play were severely restricted. Her primary role was to be the good mother and wife, but if unmarried, she could devote her life to religion, or in rare cases she could become a courtesan. It was as if a circle had been drawn around each and every woman, and she dared not explore beyond that circle. It was in a woman’s earliest years and education that she internalized these restrictions. If she studied only a limited number of subjects and practiced only certain skills, she couldn’t expand her role even if she wanted to. Knowledge was power. Caterina stands out as a remarkable exception, and it was because she benefited from a unique confluence of circumstances. The Sforzas were new to power. They had discovered in their rise to the top that a strong and capable wife could be of great assistance. They developed the practice of training their daughters in hunting and sword fighting as a way to toughen them up and make them fearless—important qualities to have as marriage pawns. Caterina’s father, however, took this further. Perhaps he saw in his daughter a female reflection of himself. Giving her his own tutor signaled some sort of identification he felt between them. And so a unique experiment began in the castle at Porta Giovia. Isolated from the outside world and allowed a tremendous degree of freedom, Caterina could develop herself in any direction she desired. Intellectually she could explore all forms of knowledge. She could indulge herself in all of her natural interests—in her case, fashion and the arts. In her physical training, she could give free rein to her own bold and adventurous spirit. In this early education, she could bring out the many different sides of her character.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  For one long year, in a small and windowless cell, she endured her loneliness and the endless tortures devised by the Borgias. Her health deteriorated and she seemed destined to die in prison, defiant to the end, but the chivalric French captain Yves d’Allegre had fallen under her spell. He persisted in demanding, in the name of the French king, to have her freed, and he finally succeeded, getting her safe passage to Florence. In retirement from public life, Caterina began to receive letters from men from all parts of Europe. Some had seen her over the years; most had only heard of her. They obsessed over her story, confessed their love, and begged for some memento, some relic to worship. One man who had caught a glimpse of her when she had first come to Rome wrote to her, “If I sleep, it seems that I am with you; if I eat, I leave my food and talk to you. . . . You are engraved in my heart.” Weakened by her year in prison, the countess died in 1509. • • • Interpretation: In Caterina Sforza’s time, the roles that a woman could play were severely restricted. Her primary role was to be the good mother and wife, but if unmarried, she could devote her life to religion, or in rare cases she could become a courtesan. It was as if a circle had been drawn around each and every woman, and she dared not explore beyond that circle. It was in a woman’s earliest years and education that she internalized these restrictions. If she studied only a limited number of subjects and practiced only certain skills, she couldn’t expand her role even if she wanted to. Knowledge was power. Caterina stands out as a remarkable exception, and it was because she benefited from a unique confluence of circumstances. The Sforzas were new to power. They had discovered in their rise to the top that a strong and capable wife could be of great assistance. They developed the practice of training their daughters in hunting and sword fighting as a way to toughen them up and make them fearless—important qualities to have as marriage pawns. Caterina’s father, however, took this further. Perhaps he saw in his daughter a female reflection of himself. Giving her his own tutor signaled some sort of identification he felt between them. And so a unique experiment began in the castle at Porta Giovia. Isolated from the outside world and allowed a tremendous degree of freedom, Caterina could develop herself in any direction she desired. Intellectually she could explore all forms of knowledge.