Love

Passages

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

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• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I fucked him across the armchair, his feet over his shoulders; I had to see his face and read what I was doing in his winces and gasps, his violent blush as I forced my cock in, the quick confusion of welcome and repulsion. I'd used up all the lube Cherif had left in the jar, but I saw tears slide from the corners of his eyes, his upper lip curled back in a gesture like anguish or goaded aggression. His hand flickered up against my chest to stay me or slow me. I was mad with love; and only half-aware, as the rhythm of the fuck took hold, of a deaf desire to hurt him, to watch a punishment inflicted and pay him back for what he'd done to me, the expense and humiliations of so many weeks. I saw the pleasure start up inside for him, as if he didn't expect it, his cock grew hard again in two seconds, his mouth slackened, but I made him flinch with steeper little thrusts. I was up on the chair, fucking him like a squaddy doing push-ups, ten, twenty, fifty . . . I had a dim sense of protest, postponed as if he wasn't quite sure, he was folded in two, powerless, the breath was pushed out of him, there was just the slicked and rubbered pumping of my cock in his arse, his little stoppered farts. His chest, his face, were smeared with sweat, but it was mine: the water poured off me like a boxer, my soaked hair fell forward and stung my eyes. And already it was about to end. I pushed myself back on to my feet, I came out of him for a moment and tugged him back by his haunches, his arsehole glittered and twitched and I thrust straight in, then held it gently, barely moving in the gulping shivery limbo just before the end. I had a high starlit sense of it as the best moment of my life. I stroked the inside of his thighs, stooped forward to lick and breathe the faint rubbery smell of his feet; took his cock out of his fist and worked it unyieldingly for him. I saw his balls clutch up, he said "No, No" and rode on to me as his thrown line of sperm soared into my face, my hair, and again, and then again. So I pushed over the edge myself—I made a grieving moan at the bitterness of it, craving the blessing of his gaze, though his eyes were oddly velled, fluttering and colourless like some Orst temptress's.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  In the event we had a delicious Belpoori that cost almost nothing, served by a boy James ogled with a quite new kind of forwardness, while the rain lashed down outside. Perhaps it was the rain that made us reminisce, about beautiful Oxford contemporaries and how they had become bankers, or put on weight, or got married. It was still raining when we left, so I suppressed my fondness for the Underground and took a lighted cab that was approaching. The cabby looked unimpressionable as I rather ostentatiously kissed James goodbye, and let my hand run down over his backside. He was so lovable, shy, manly, I couldn’t see why he wasn’t adored more, or more often. Yet if I couldn’t do it there might be a reason others couldn’t: he didn’t project sex enough, he was too subtle a taste for the instant world of clubs and bars. We had slept together once or twice, but we were both funny with each other and did no more than kiss and cuddle. ‘See you when all this is over, darling,’ I said, and nipped from under his umbrella into the taxi, looking, as I always instinctively do, at the cabby’s hand on the wheel to see if he wore a wedding-ring. I had had some good experiences with cabbies, and even straight ones could reach such a pitch of frustration, stuck in their cab and driving around mindlessly for hundreds of miles every day, that they were glad to come in for half an hour and talk filth, or you could show them a video and suck them off. This particular man, however, offered no temptation, and seemed to have become grafted into the grimy, bulging box of his cab. As we left the crowded, shop-brightened streets behind us and crossed into the exclusive quiet of Holland Park I yawned and looked out with pleasure at the deserted pavements, glistening where a street-lamp stood, the overhanging budding branches of trees in front gardens, the unthinking stability which wealth lent the small mansions behind them, where occasional windows, with curtains it was felt unnecessary to draw, revealed books reaching to coved ceilings, figures holding glasses moving about, discreet lighting picking out pictures in dull gold frames. I paid off the cabby at the gate, and jogged across the short gravel sweep to the door at the side of the dark house which gave access to the stairs to my apartment. A small lamp glowed above it, and the wet dripped down from the bare twigs of the creeper which surrounded the recessed porchway.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  My grandma also had two younger sisters, Betty and Rose, whom I loved each very much, but I was obsessed with the Blanton men. I would sit among them and beg them to tell and retell their stories. These men were the gatekeepers to the family’s oral tradition, and I was their best student. Most of this tradition was far from child appropriate. Almost all of it involved the kind of violence that should land someone in jail. Much of it centered on how the county in which Jackson was situated—Breathitt—earned its alliterative nickname, “Bloody Breathitt.” There were many explanations, but they all had one theme: The people of Breathitt hated certain things, and they didn’t need the law to snuff them out. One of the most common tales of Breathitt’s gore revolved around an older man in town who was accused of raping a young girl. Mamaw told me that, days before his trial, the man was found facedown in a local lake with sixteen bullet wounds in his back. The authorities never investigated the murder, and the only mention of the incident appeared in the local newspaper on the morning his body was discovered. In an admirable display of journalistic pith, the paper reported: “Man found dead. Foul play expected.” “Foul play expected?” my grandmother would roar. “You’re goddamned right. Bloody Breathitt got to that son of a bitch.” Or there was that day when Uncle Teaberry overheard a young man state a desire to “eat her panties,” a reference to his sister’s (my Mamaw’s) undergarments. Uncle Teaberry drove home, retrieved a pair of Mamaw’s underwear, and forced the young man—at knifepoint—to consume the clothing. Some people may conclude that I come from a clan of lunatics. But the stories made me feel like hillbilly royalty, because these were classic good-versus-evil stories, and my people were on the right side. My people were extreme, but extreme in the service of something—defending a sister’s honor or ensuring that a criminal paid for his crimes. The Blanton men, like the tomboy Blanton sister whom I called Mamaw, were enforcers of hillbilly justice, and to me, that was the very best kind. Despite their virtues, or perhaps because of them, the Blanton men were full of vice. A few of them left a trail of neglected children, cheated wives, or both. And I didn’t even know them that well: I saw them only at large family reunions or during the holidays. Still, I loved and worshipped them. I once overheard Mamaw tell her mother that I loved the Blanton men because so many father figures had come and gone, but the Blanton men were always there. There’s definitely a kernel of truth to that. But more than anything, the Blanton men were the living embodiment of the hills of Kentucky. I loved them because I loved Jackson.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I couldn't answer that. I felt lost and utterly unknown. "It doesn't matter," I said. "He didn't do anything." I turned back towards the tent. If only we were in our respective homes, if we'd just put the tent up one morning in the garden to see how it was done. I hated the tent, and the hours to come, with Dawn squashing me and nowhere to escape to but the night and its predators. I wouldn't say anything about it now, but I felt I could reasonably get up at first light, under the pretext of writing a poem. When I looked back I could just make out Dawn running very fast across the slope, the retreating stranger peeping round at the last moment as he brought him down with a quick easy tackle, got up and jogged back. Beyond them both, on the crest of the hill, figures were moving among the trees. I hadn't been in All Saints for years and had forgotten what a reassuringly unsacred building it was; the old village church had been replaced in the late eighteenth century by a broad stuccoed box with an organ gallery and white box pews and a huge east window of clear glass, with trees and the vicar's upstairs windows visible as one sat and listened to him or thought about lunch. Only the old grey west tower had been kept from the earlier building, and that was under wraps again, being gently cleaned by weeks of running water. I arrived early and found the vicar negotiating with the masons about sheltering the mourners from the incessant cold downward flow. Then we went inside and pulled the chains that kindled primitive overhead heaters: I paced around through their warping blast, getting the feel of the place, more distracted by nerves than grief. I remembered the nausea that preceded class when I was a schoolteacher; even a personal tutorial could approach with a certain chill tread. "Oh darling!" I gasped, and loitered, fiddling with a pew-door's loose brass catch, lost in a gripping daydream of love for Luc. "Everything all right?" murmured the vicar, resting a hand on my shoulder and swishing his alien skirts against my legs.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell him self the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations. We know how a person, in such a paralysis, is unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently in deed he mistakes the one for the other. And this, I think, we do. We are the strongest nation in the western world, but this is not for the reasons that we think. It is because we have an opportunity which no other nation has of moving beyond the Old World concepts of race and class and caste, and create, finally, what we must have had in mind when we first began speaking of the New World. But the price for this is a long look backward whence we came and an unflinching assessment of the record . For an artist, the record of that journey is most clearly revealed in the personalities of the people the journey produced. Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation, make freedom real. Creati1>e America, 1962 Color W HITE �E. aLU!Q!: _ _really whi!:�J;!J!UQJor<;_ci. people g_n SQ _ �etimes b� - e.�r��_ely colored. In Negro speech, the word "colored" has very special reverberations. One may hear, in sorrow, "Man, that cat is just too colored." And this can mean, depending on the speaker, the situation, the sub ject, that the cat under discussion is coarse, overb�<!dng,__in competent and so .u11certai[1 of his valiJq.hat he j_� p �� a\ly adoptmg the most outrageous and transparent affectations. Th1s is one of rheffieanings of color Inn the psyche a nd -- the experience of the American Negro. But the same phrase can also be applied to someone who is...di.r�q, wann, _ unaffected and unconquerable-someone, who, like Duke Ellington, is able to move, without missing a beat or manifesting the slightest uneasiness, fr om Harlem corn bread to Buckingham Palace caviar and back again, ad infinitum. "The Duke knows who is, man": which reveals another aspect of the meaning of color among the people who constitute America's most te nacious and problematical minority.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  While he slept I kept watch over him—a smooth shoulder, the little pool of the clavicle, his neck, his extraordinary face, his hair muddled and pushed back. His lips were parted and dry, and I felt anxiously that I should wet them from a flask or with a soaked rag. It seemed mad to have him here and not be making love to him over and over, but I was consecrated to his repose: my mood became oddly chivalric. I remembered the old Altidorean legend—not as far as I knew espoused by Luc—which made him a direct descendant of the Virgin Mary, admittedly in her later, post-virginal phase. I'd known from early on that he had something unearthly about him—it was all more than likely. I lay back dazzled by his mere companionship, the trust he put in me to see him through the night. I thought of Ty's little agenda: get rid of Cherif—for the moment that seemed to be done, my thoughts didn't even track him as far as Matt's and whatever they were doing there; find the best in Rex Stout—I perhaps hadn't followed that to the letter, I'd been a lout; tell Luc you love him, or you will never have peace with yourself. So I said it into the air, not loud enough to wake him—I hardly heard it myself over the blow-heater's rattle and rumble next door, that might have been a ferry's trembling engines, heard from a cabin on a night crossing. I dreamt I had met a young man by the seaside. We went for long, energetic, rather tense walks, away from the sea and through a derelict industrial estate. I was very keen on him; he had curly dark hair and blue eyes and was astonishingly strong. He ripped a steel door off a windowless, bunker-like building, just to show me what he could do. I was exhilarated. I was too shy to ask, but I hoped he would do other such tricks. We sat down on a dusty doorstep, there was no one around, and he tugged his shirt off to show me his chest muscles and his biceps. I was calling him Luc, though I was almost certain that wasn't his name, and he took a slow, calculating moment or two to react to it. "Yes, I'm Luc," he said; "of course I am." And he lobbed a breeze-block through a window across the street as though to prove it.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He spread out a pale blue towel with tattered edges, an old towel kept for the beach, for tar and sun-oil. Then he paced around it in a territorial sort of way, and looked out towards the dunes. I thought for a while he might be going on to the beach instead and that I would lose my almost supernatural vantage-point. But he resolved on privacy and I saw at once his shy, clever dignity—it made me love him even more. He tugged off his jersey and lay down, reaching out for a cloth bag: I watched him take out some lotion and read the bottle before deciding he wasn't likely to get burnt; the sun was bright, though, and he put on visor sunglasses, their arms linked behind by a short embroidered band. Then he rolled on to his front and opened a book, he was looking away from me and I refined the focus over his shoulder and made out a typical page of Poets of our Time: he must have folded a pencil in as a marker, and he was soon underlining words and scoring the margin and then for about five minutes he worked on a dense, formal doodle—I think it was on a Roy Campbell page. The thing about our Time was that it was really our Fathers' Time. I wondered at my own impulse to keep him back with me in a shared childhood of unfashionable lyrics and discredited rhetoric. I studied his naked brown back more closely than I had ever studied anything—the wide plates of his shoulderblades, the slight boyish dip between as he leant on his elbows, traces of pink scratches on the shoulders, the shaped, backswept golden hair stacked in the embroidered sling of the shades-band. When I put down the binoculars to take off my trousers I was confused to find myself indoors, in another house, and not kneeling just behind his open legs ready to fuck him or tickle his feet. I came back to my vigil to find him standing up and looking around, and I thought perhaps he was giving up already. Matt was quite wrong to say he was skinny; he was lean but no more skinny than Matt was, and his chest was surprisingly big, with wide milky nipples. I knelt there teasing the air with my tongue and teeth, and working my jaw in imaginary kisses. He was taking his trousers off.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Luc was perfectly friendly in bed, though he smiled more to reassure himself than to charm me. I was given the feeling I'd slightly overstepped the mark. I was sweet to him, our heads together on the pillow, though I tried not to crowd him and torment him. I laid an arm carelessly over his warm stomach. I wanted to hold him, he was everything to me. His eyes were closed, but he would never sleep when his heart was speeding so. "Are you all right, darling?" "Mmm." Another slow smile, a pat on my protecting arm. "It's a jolly good job you came into the bar this evening." A pause, in which he sighed and swallowed. "I mean, it's not as if you often do." "No." It struck me that if I hadn't been there he could have ended up with someone else; perhaps on other nights he had—it made me feel sick. "Had you ever been in the Cassette before?" "We had a bet," he said, with a smirk. So it was just a dare, I thought there'd been a certain bravado to him . . . "About whether you'd be in there." "Oh . . . " I couldn't tell if that made me a fool or a dangerous dark horse. "And who thought I would be?" "They did. I thought you might be, but I didn't know. I said not. I thought I'd won, because I didn't see you in there, but then you came up to talk to us." Did it quite figure? I caught their cryptic exchange of looks again, saw the thread of mockery glint again in the story of the evening. Still, he had stayed for me, and I had triumphed. I had obliterated Patrick and Sibylle. "They think you've got a crunch on me," he said. "And why would they think that?" I asked lightly and then wished I hadn't. But he was too clever to answer, or too kind. He turned towards me, saw my confusion and kissed me on the cheek. Well—even if he was of their opinion, it clearly didn't trouble him. Even, I thought, if he's just using me, slumming it with me here, it's happiness, it's a fucking miracle. I ran my hand over him and between his legs. He was hard again, and so was I. I half-rolled on to him and he lounged round me like a cat, drawing up a leg, a heel that rubbed along my thigh and rested roughly and electrifyingly in the crack of my arse. I thought "scratch bottom" and smiled at him and to myself but I didn't explain; it felt both a comfort and a sadness to live so much more than him in the world of metaphors and puns. He gently pushed me off, saying "Not now", though he left an arm limply over me, our calves were crossed. I wondered if he felt the transgressive thrill of a man's hairy legs against his own.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  My first visit was from Taha—a ‘box-visit’, a reunion conducted through glass. I was wildly shaken to see him, so that I could not think of much to say. He smiled and was solicitous, and I looked at him closely, masochistically, for signs that he was ashamed of me. It was extraordinary how his confidence was undimmed: he spoke very quietly, so as not to be overheard by the guards or the other prisoners, and told me a score of sweet, inconsequential things. The second time he came, a few weeks later, we were allowed to sit at a table together: he had his little boy with him now, who seemed very excited at being allowed into a prison but frightened too of being left behind. Taha told him to hang on tight to my hand, and as he himself was holding my other hand we sat linked in a triangle, as if conducting a seance. The day before had been Taha’s birthday—and of course I had nothing to give him. He was forty-four! I can honestly say that he was no less beautiful to me than he had been when I saw him first, twenty-eight years ago. His brow was higher, his face scored with lines that had been mere charcoal strokes on the boy’s velvety brow and cheeks. His eyes, though, had deepened their immensity of melancholy and laughter, and his exquisite hands too were lined and shiny as old leather, as if he had done far more than merely polishing my shoes and silver. That night I lay long awake, caught up again, with a vividness of recall, in the life we had spent together. Despite a thousand differences it was like a marriage, a great, chaste bond of love and tact—which made it all the odder that he had really married and become a father. I was gripped again by my mood of awful falseness and despair on his wedding day, when I gave him away into that little house in North Kensington and into a world more unknown and inaccessible than the Nuba Hills where I had found him first. Since then I have seen this period simply as a test, challenging our bond only to affirm it again. The terms were different, his independence, as each evening he went off on the Central Line, took a concrete, dignified form; but his loyalty was unaltered. Perhaps his distancing even endeared him to me more, and showed me afresh a devotion to which we had both become over-accustomed.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I will send my address soon. Goodbye.” “Wait, you little shithead. Are you okay?” “Sorry, Mamaw, can’t talk. But yes, I’m okay. I’ll write as soon as I can.” The drill instructor, overhearing my two extra lines of conversation, asked sarcastically whether I’d made enough time “for her to tell you a fucking story.” That was the first day. There are no phone calls in boot camp. I was allowed only one, to call Lindsay when her half brother died. I realized, through letters, how much my family loved me. While most other recruits—that’s what they called us; we had to earn the title “marine” by completing the rigors of boot camp—received a letter every day or two, I sometimes received a half dozen each night. Mamaw wrote every day, sometimes several times, offering extended thoughts on what was wrong with the world in some and few-sentence streams of consciousness in others. Most of all, Mamaw wanted to know how my days were going and reassure me. Recruiters told families that what most of us needed were words of encouragement, and Mamaw delivered that in spades. As I struggled with screaming drill instructors and physical fitness routines that pushed my out-of-shape body to its limits, I read every day that Mamaw was proud of me, that she loved me, and that she knew I wouldn’t give up. Thanks to either my wisdom or inherited hoarder tendencies, I managed to keep nearly every one of the letters I received from my family. Many of them shed an interesting light on the home I left behind. A letter from Mom, asking me what I might need and telling me how proud she is of me. “I was babysitting [Lindsay’s kids],” she reports. “They played with slugs outside. They squeezed one and killed it. But I threw it away and told them they didn’t because Kam got a little upset, thinking he killed it.” This is Mom at her best: loving and funny, a woman who delighted in her grandchildren. In the same letter, a reference to Greg, likely a boyfriend who has since disappeared from my memory. And an insight into our sense of normalcy: “Mandy’s husband Terry,” she starts, referencing a friend of hers, “was arrested on a probation violation and sent to prison. So they are all doing OK.” Lindsay also wrote often, sending multiple letters in the same envelope, each on a different-colored piece of paper, with instructions on the back—“Read this one second; this is the last one.” Every single letter contained some reference to her kids. I learned of my oldest niece’s successful potty training; my nephew’s soccer matches; my younger niece’s early smiles and first efforts to reach for things. After a lifetime of shared triumphs and tragedies, we both adored her kids more than anything else.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  In my youth, it was the height of fine dining—my grandma’s and my favorite restaurant. With Yale friends, it was a greasy public health crisis. These aren’t exactly major problems, and if given the option all over again, I’d trade a bit of social discomfort for the life I lead in a heartbeat. But as I realized that in this new world I was the cultural alien, I began to think seriously about questions that had nagged at me since I was a teenager: Why has no one else from my high school made it to the Ivy League? Why are people like me so poorly represented in America’s elite institutions? Why is domestic strife so common in families like mine? Why did I think that places like Yale and Harvard were so unreachable? Why did successful people feel so different ? Chapter 13As I began to think a bit more deeply about my own identity, I fell hard for a classmate of mine named Usha. As luck would have it, we were assigned as partners for our first major writing assignment, so we spent a lot of time during that first year getting to know each other. She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful. I joked with a buddy that if she had possessed a terrible personality, she would have made an excellent heroine in an Ayn Rand novel, but she had a great sense of humor and an extraordinarily direct way of speaking. Where others might have asked meekly, “Yeah, maybe you could rephrase this?” or “Have you thought about this other idea?” Usha would say simply: “I think this sentence needs work” or “This is a pretty terrible argument.” At a bar, she looked up at a mutual friend of ours and said, without a hint of irony, “You have a very small head.” I had never met anyone like her. I had dated other girls before, some serious, some not. But Usha occupied an entirely different emotional universe. I thought about her constantly. One friend described me as “heartsick” and another told me he had never seen me like this. Toward the end of our first year, I learned that Usha was single, and I immediately asked her out. After a few weeks of flirtations and a single date, I told her that I was in love with her. It violated every rule of modern dating I’d learned as a young man, but I didn’t care. Usha was like my Yale spirit guide. She’d attended the university for college, too, and knew all of the best coffee shops and places to eat. Her knowledge went much deeper, however: She instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask, and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed. “Go to office hours,” she’d tell me. “Professors here like to engage with students.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  On the little projecting dormers of the lower attic floor the occupants of the upper put out their bottles of milk to keep cool, or spread swimming things to dry, despite the danger of pigeons. Inside, the Club is mildly derelict in mood, crowded at certain times, and then oddly deserted, like a school. In the entrance hall in the evening people are always going to and from meetings, or signing each other up for volleyball teams or fitness classes. In the hall the worlds of the hotel above, and the club below, meet. I would always take the downward stair, its handrail tingling with static electricity, and turn along the underground corridor to the gym, the weights room and the dowdy magnificence of the pool. It was a place I loved, a gloomy and functional underworld full of life, purpose and sexuality. Boys, from the age of seventeen, could go there to work on their bodies in the stagnant, aphrodisiac air of the weights room. As you got older, it grew dearer, but quite a few men of advanced years, members since youth and displaying the drooping relics of toned-up pectorals, still paid the price and tottered in to cast an appreciative eye at the showering youngsters. ‘With brother clubs in all the major cities of the world,’ their names and dates incised in marble beneath the founder’s bust in the hall, the large core of men who worked out daily were always supplemented by visitors needing a dip or a game of squash or to find a friend. More than once I had ended up in a bedroom of the hotel above with a man I had smiled at in the showers. The Corry proved the benefit of smiling in general. A sweet, dull man smiled at me there on my first day, talked to me, showed me what was what. I was still an undergraduate then, and a trifle nervous, anticipating, with confused dread and longing, scenes of grim machismo and institutionalised vice. Bill Hawkins, a pillar of the place, I subsequently discovered, fortyish, with the broad belt and sexless underbelly of the heavy weight-lifter, had simply extended camaraderie to a newcomer. ‘Hallo, Will,’ he said to me now as I entered the changing-room and he came back, grunting and staring from a monster workout. ‘Hi, Bill,’ I replied. ‘How’re you doing?’ It was our inevitable exchange, in which some vestige of a joke seemed to reside, our having the same name yet, by the difference of a letter, each being called something altogether different. ‘Haven’t seen you for a bit,’ he said. ‘No, I seem to have had quite a lot on,’ I hinted. ‘Glad to hear it, Will,’ he replied, following me round the little maze of banked lockers. I found one that was free, slung my bag into it, and began to undress. Bill stood by me, amicable, massive, flushed, his head and shoulders still rinsed with sweat.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Two generations ago, my grandparents were dirt-poor and in love. They got married and moved north in the hope of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. Their grandchild (me) graduated from one of the finest educational institutions in the world. That’s the short version. The long version exists in the pages that follow. Though I sometimes change the names of people to protect their privacy, this story is, to the best of my recollection, a fully accurate portrait of the world I’ve witnessed. There are no composite characters and no narrative shortcuts. Where possible, I corroborated the details with documentation—report cards, handwritten letters, notes on photographs—but I am sure this story is as fallible as any human memory. Indeed, when I asked my sister to read an earlier draft, that draft ignited a thirty-minute conversation about whether I had misplaced an event chronologically. I left my version in, not because I suspect my sister’s memory is faulty (in fact, I imagine hers is better than mine), but because I think there is something to learn in how I’ve organized the events in my own mind. Nor am I an unbiased observer. Nearly every person you will read about is deeply flawed. Some have tried to murder other people, and a few were successful. Some have abused their children, physically or emotionally. Many abused (and still abuse) drugs. But I love these people, even those to whom I avoid speaking for my own sanity. And if I leave you with the impression that there are bad people in my life, then I am sorry, both to you and to the people so portrayed. For there are no villains in this story. There’s just a ragtag band of hillbillies struggling to find their way—both for their sake and, by the grace of God, for mine. Chapter 1Like most small children, I learned my home address so that if I got lost, I could tell a grown-up where to take me. In kindergarten, when the teacher asked me where I lived, I could recite the address without skipping a beat, even though my mother changed addresses frequently, for reasons I never understood as a child. Still, I always distinguished “my address” from “my home.” My address was where I spent most of my time with my mother and sister, wherever that might be. But my home never changed: my great-grandmother’s house, in the holler, in Jackson, Kentucky. Jackson is a small town of about two thousand in the heart of southeastern Kentucky’s coal country. Calling it a town is a bit charitable: There’s a courthouse, a few restaurants—almost all of them fast-food chains—and a few other shops and stores. Most of the people live in the mountains surrounding Kentucky Highway 15, in trailer parks, in government-subsidized housing, in small farmhouses, and in mountain homesteads like the one that served as the backdrop for the fondest memories of my childhood.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I went on into the gym, believing that some kind of agreement had been made, that it filled his thoughts now as it did mine. Then for a few minutes I made myself think about something else, concentrated on my exercises on the mat, stretching and limbering up. Because I was so easily moved by people, I had learned to distance myself, just in those moments when I felt them taking hold: I made myself regard them, and even more myself, with a careless, almost cynical detachment. But as I gathered, spread and folded up my body now, endeavouring to feel alive all over, ready and independent, I saw Phil again, in one of those odd coups d’oeil , typical not only of his hesitant mobile manner but of so much of gay life, where happiness can depend on the glance of a stranger, caught and returned. Aptly enough, I was lying on my back, with my legs in the air, wide apart. Between them I saw him pass the open gym door, his bag in his hand, his shirt-sleeves rolled up in tight bands around his biceps. He went by, but a second or two later stepped back again, and peeped into the gym. Our eyes met, I raised my head, he looked for a moment longer, and then, moved perhaps by the secrecy which characterised his doings, without smiling, turned and went off. As I sat up it was as if a fist squeezed my heart and cracked a tiny flask at its centre, saturating it with love. An hour or so later I found James in the shower. He held out his hands to me in a pathetic gesture; the fingertips were white and puckered. ‘A long time, eh?’ I commiserated. ‘There’s just been nothing, darling. I don’t know why I bother.’ ‘Nor, I confess, do I.’ James, in his maudlin way, was waiting around for something worth looking at to stroll in. ‘How long, as a matter of interest?’ He had no watch on. ‘It may be as much as half an hour.’ ‘You must be jolly clean, anyway.’ I pulled off my trunks, and noticed him peek, with the neutralised sexual interest that existed between us, at my dick. ‘Spotless. But enough of me. How are you?’ ‘In a strange position.’ ‘Tiring of His Speechlessness the Khedive of Tower Hamlets?’ ‘Oh—no, that’s all over ages ago.’ ‘Oh …’ A veneer of commiseration covered a discernible pleasure at the news. I chose not to expand on it. ‘No, it’s my queer peer, you remember? He wants me to write his life.’ James gave me an old-fashioned look. ‘Whitewash, I imagine?’ I considered this. ‘I think not, actually. He talks of handing over diaries, telling all.’ ‘But what is there to tell?’ ‘I think a lot. I’ve just been to see his memorabilia.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I was sweet to him, our heads together on the pillow, though I tried not to crowd him and torment him. I laid an arm carelessly over his warm stomach. I wanted to hold him, he was everything to me. His eyes were closed, but he would never sleep when his heart was speeding so. "Are you all right, darling?" "Mmm." Another slow smile, a pat on my protecting arm. "It's a jolly good job you came into the bar this evening." A pause, in which he sighed and swallowed. "I mean, it's not as if you often do." "No." It struck me that if I hadn't been there he could have ended up with someone else; perhaps on other nights he had—it made me feel sick. "Had you ever been in the Cassette before?" "We had a bet," he said, with a smirk. So it was just a dare, I thought there'd been a certain bravado to him . . . "About whether you'd be in there." "Oh . . . " I couldn't tell if that made me a fool or a dangerous dark horse. "And who thought I would be?" "They did. I thought you might be, but I didn't know. I said not. I thought I'd won, because I didn't see you in there, but then you came up to talk to us." Did it quite figure? I caught their cryptic exchange of looks again, saw the thread of mockery glint again in the story of the evening. Still, he had stayed for me, and I had triumphed. I had obliterated Patrick and Sibylle. "They think you've got a crunch on me," he said. "And why would they think that?" I asked lightly and then wished I hadn't. But he was too clever to answer, or too kind. He turned towards me, saw my confusion and kissed me on the cheek. Well—even if he was of their opinion, it clearly didn't trouble him. Even, I thought, if he's just using me, slumming it with me here, it's happiness, it's a fucking miracle. I ran my hand over him and between his legs. He was hard again, and so was I. I half-rolled on to him and he lounged round me like a cat, drawing up a leg, a heel that rubbed along my thigh and rested roughly and electrifyingly in the crack of my arse. I thought "scratch bottom" and smiled at him and to myself but I didn't explain; it felt both a comfort and a sadness to live so much more than him in the world of metaphors and puns. He gently pushed me off, saying "Not now", though he left an arm limply over me, our calves were crossed. I wondered if he felt the transgressive thrill of a man's hairy legs against his own.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Papaw would sit on our porch to smoke, and I’d sit out there with him and listen to him grumble about politics or the steelworkers’ union. When I learned to read, Mom bought me my first chapter book—Space Brat —and heaped praise on me for finishing it quickly. I loved to read, and I loved to work on math problems with Papaw, and I loved the way that Mom seemed to delight in everything I did. Mom and I bonded over other things, especially our favorite sport: football. I read every word I could about Joe Montana, the greatest quarterback of all time, watched every game, and wrote fan mail to the 49ers and later the Chiefs, Montana’s two teams. Mom checked out books on football strategy from the public library, and we built little models of the field with construction paper and loose change—pennies for the defense, nickels and dimes for the offense. Mom didn’t want me to understand only the rules of football; she wanted me to understand the strategy. We practiced on our construction-paper football field, going over the various contingencies: What happened if a particular lineman (a shiny nickel) missed his block? What could the quarterback (a dime) do if no receiver (another dime) was open? We didn’t have chess, but we did have football. More than anyone else in my family, Mom wanted us to be exposed to people from all walks of life. Her friend Scott was a kind old gay man who, she later told me, died unexpectedly. She made me watch a movie about Ryan White, a boy not that much older than I was, who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion and had to start a legal fight to return to school. Every time I complained about school, Mom reminded me of Ryan White and spoke about what a blessing it was to get an education. She was so overcome by White’s story that she handwrote a letter to his mother after he died in 1990. Mom believed deeply in the promise of education. She was the salutatorian of her high school class but never made it to college because Lindsay was born weeks after Mom graduated from high school. But she did return to a local community college and earn an associate’s degree in nursing. I was probably seven or eight when she started working full-time as a nurse, and I liked to think that I had contributed in some small way: I “helped” her study by crawling all over her, and I let her practice drawing blood on my youthful veins. Sometimes Mom’s devotion to education arguably went a little too far. During my third-grade science fair project, Mom helped at every stage—from planning the project to assisting with lab notes to assembling the presentation. The night before everything was due, the project looked precisely how it deserved to look: like the work of a third-grader who had slacked off a bit.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Although we had been together a lot in the previous week I had privately told him nothing about the Nantwich affair. ‘I’ve just got to talk to some old man about something—I don’t imagine there’ll be much to it.’ Phil stayed silent. It would soon be time for him to go to work, and I felt him already preparing to abstract himself. Tonight this distancing gave me a little qualm, and as he sat up to get dressed I pushed him back roughly and fucked him hard and fast, his asshole still tacky with spunk and grease from our slower, longer lovemaking just before. As he cleaned up afterwards and looked out his laundered clothes there was still a reserve in his manner, nothing so strong as resentment, but the first suggestion of an independence which it was only dignified that I should allow. All the same I felt unhappy. While he sat on the end of the bed with his back turned to me and pulled on his socks, I looked baffledly at his compact physique. Then he was sitting very still and I caught his eye in the gloomy recess of the dressing-table mirror. ‘Man, I really do love you,’ he said, both as if it were a discovery and to reassure me and chide me for being silly just because he didn’t want to go on a journey to Limehouse (a journey whose only conceivable interest for him would have been that of being with me). To show goodwill he came back upstairs a few minutes after leaving and quite startled me as I stood naked looking out at the stars. He had brought me, under cover of Room Service, a tray with a smoked salmon sandwich and a glass of Drambuie—things which hardly went together, but which had touchingly been chosen for their luxuriousness. The following evening, after an early swim, I went on east on the Central Line. The City had already evacuated, and though the train was crowded to Liverpool Street there was only a scattering of us left for Bethnal Green, Mile End and beyond. All the other people in my car—Indian women with carrier-bags, some beery labourers, a beautiful black boy in a track-suit—looked tired and habituated. When I got out at Mile End, though, other passengers got on, residents of an unknown area who used the Underground, just as I did, as a local service, commuting and shopping within the suburbs and rarely if ever going to the West End, which I visited daily. I felt more competent for my mobility, but also vaguely abashed as I came out into the unimpressionable streets of this strange neighbourhood. I was a touch nervous as well: it was my first independent research into Charles’s life and finding myself doing it I also found myself precipitately involved in the project.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The normal objection to theories of atonement and redemption that focus on divine anger is that this seems to run contrary to the deepest themes of the New Testament. Now, of course, divine anger at human rebellion and particularly at the rebellion of the chosen people features prominently throughout Israel’s scriptures. Similar notes are struck in the New Testament, not least in the teaching of Jesus himself. And suggestion that “sin” does not make God angry (a frequent idea in modern thought as a reaction against the caricatures of an ill-tempered deity) needs to be treated with disdain. When God looks at sin, what he sees is what a violin maker would see if the player were to use his lovely creation as a tennis racquet. But here is the difference. In many expressions of pagan religion, the humans have to try to pacify the angry deity. But that’s not how it happens in Israel’s scriptures. The biblical promises of redemption have to do with God himself acting because of his unchanging, unshakeable love for his people. This theme runs like a scarlet thread through the scriptures, going back at least to Deuteronomy: You are a people holy to YHWH your God; YHWH your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that YHWH set his heart on you and chose you—for you were the fewest of all peoples. It was because YHWH loved you and kept the oath that he swore to your ancestors, that YHWH has brought you out with almighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Know therefore that YHWH your God is God, the faithful God who maintains covenant loyalty with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations. (Deut. 7:6–9) Although heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to YHWH your God, the earth with all that is in it, yet YHWH set his heart in love on your ancestors alone and chose you, their descendants after them, out of all the people, as it is today. . . . He is your praise; he is your God, who has done for you these great and awesome things that your own eyes have seen. (Deut. 10:14–15, 21; cf. 4:37) Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. . . . For I am YHWH your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you. Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you, I give people in return for you, nations in exchange for your life. (Isa. 43:1, 3–4) For he said, “Surely they are my people, children who will not deal falsely”; And he became their savior in all their distress.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  (13:13) There is a hierarchy of spiritual gifts, and the most important gift is love. The context of 1 Corinthians 12–14 gives this text an even richer meaning than when it is heard, as it most often is, apart from that context. First, the love of which Paul speaks is a spiritual gift, not simply an act of will, not something we decide to do, not simply good advice for couples and others. Rather, as a spiritual gift, love is the most important result (and evidence) of a Spirit transplant. As the primary fruit of the Spirit, it is also the criterion by which the other gifts are evaluated. Second, when this text is heard apart from its context, it often sentimentalizes, trivializes, and individualizes what Paul meant by love. It should not be reduced to a tribute in praise of love. Nor should its meaning be reduced to being nice, sensitive, thoughtful, faithful, and kind, even though those are fine qualities. And it should not be reduced to behavior in individual relationships, important as that is. Rather, for Paul, love in this text is radical shorthand for what life “in Christ” is like—life in the “new creation,” life “in the Spirit,” life animated by a Spirit transplant. As the primary fruit of a Spirit-filled life, love is about more than our relationships with individuals. For Paul, it had (for want of a better word) a social meaning as well. The social form of love for Paul was distributive justice and nonviolence, bread and peace. Paul’s vision of life “in Christ,” life in the “new creation,” did not mean, “Accept the imperial way of life with its oppression and violence, but practice love in your personal relationships.” To make the same point differently, people like Jesus and Paul were not executed for saying, “Love one another.” They were killed because their understanding of love meant more than being compassionate toward individuals, although it did include that. It also meant standing against the domination systems that ruled their world, and collaborating with the Spirit in the creation of a new way of life that stood in contrast to the normalcy of the wisdom of this world. Love and justice go together. Justice without love can be brutal, and love without justice can be banal. Love is the heart of justice, and justice is the social form of love. TWO WAYS OF LIFE: FLESH AND SPIRIT Paul’s letter to his conflicted community in Galatia provides another description of life “in Christ.” As in 1 Corinthians 13, the text emphasizes love as the primary quality of living by the Spirit: For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”…Live by the Spirit, I say.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He smiled and was solicitous, and I looked at him closely, masochistically, for signs that he was ashamed of me. It was extraordinary how his confidence was undimmed: he spoke very quietly, so as not to be overheard by the guards or the other prisoners, and told me a score of sweet, inconsequential things. The second time he came, a few weeks later, we were allowed to sit at a table together: he had his little boy with him now, who seemed very excited at being allowed into a prison but frightened too of being left behind. Taha told him to hang on tight to my hand, and as he himself was holding my other hand we sat linked in a triangle, as if conducting a seance. The day before had been Taha’s birthday—and of course I had nothing to give him. He was forty-four! I can honestly say that he was no less beautiful to me than he had been when I saw him first, twenty-eight years ago. His brow was higher, his face scored with lines that had been mere charcoal strokes on the boy’s velvety brow and cheeks. His eyes, though, had deepened their immensity of melancholy and laughter, and his exquisite hands too were lined and shiny as old leather, as if he had done far more than merely polishing my shoes and silver. That night I lay long awake, caught up again, with a vividness of recall, in the life we had spent together. Despite a thousand differences it was like a marriage, a great, chaste bond of love and tact—which made it all the odder that he had really married and become a father. I was gripped again by my mood of awful falseness and despair on his wedding day, when I gave him away into that little house in North Kensington and into a world more unknown and inaccessible than the Nuba Hills where I had found him first. Since then I have seen this period simply as a test, challenging our bond only to affirm it again. The terms were different, his independence, as each evening he went off on the Central Line, took a concrete, dignified form; but his loyalty was unaltered. Perhaps his distancing even endeared him to me more, and showed me afresh a devotion to which we had both become over-accustomed. Such thoughts were still uppermost in my mind when I was called to see the governor a couple of days later. We had not met since the cursory talking-to of my first day, an occasion when I was strongly aware of the unease that his brief and accidental superiority had given him. Dressed though I was in my deforming prison bags I was made to feel wickedly sophisticated. He knew the disadvantage I suffered under would not—even should not—last. Today he was absent, and one of the senior officers took his place, pacing behind the desk but starchily resisting the temptation to sit down.