Pride

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 Between the World and Me (2015)

  Your route will be different. It must be. You knew things at eleven that I did not know when I was twenty-five. When I was eleven my highest priority was the simple security of my body. My life was the immediate negotiation of violence—within my house and without. But already you have expectations, I see that in you. Survival and safety are not enough. Your hopes—your dreams, if you will—leave me with an array of warring emotions. I am so very proud of you—your openness, your ambition, your aggression, your intelligence. My job, in the little time we have left together, is to match that intelligence with wisdom. Part of that wisdom is understanding what you were given—a city where gay bars are unremarkable, a soccer team on which half the players speak some other language. What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is not strictly yours and is largely the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body. Perhaps that is why, when you discovered that the killer of Mike Brown would go unpunished, you told me you had to go. Perhaps that is why you were crying, because in that moment you understood that even your relatively privileged security can never match a sustained assault launched in the name of the Dream. Our current politics tell you that should you fall victim to such an assault and lose your body, it somehow must be your fault. Trayvon Martin’s hoodie got him killed. Jordan Davis’s loud music did the same. John Crawford should never have touched the rifle on display. Kajieme Powell should have known not to be crazy. And all of them should have had fathers—even the ones who had fathers, even you. Without its own justifications, the Dream would collapse upon itself. You first learned this from Michael Brown. I first learned it from Prince Jones.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  We were best friends.” Popular, active in school government, and a member of the drill team, Brenda was an ambitious student who excelled at almost everything she tried. She was also beautiful, in the wholesome, all-American farm-girl idiom: in 1980 she was first runner-up in the Miss Twin Falls Pageant. After graduating from high school with honors, Brenda enrolled at the University of Idaho, where she was elected president of her sorority. “But,” says her mother, “that wasn’t the kind of life she wanted to lead, so she came back home to Twin Falls and went to the College of Southern Idaho for two years, then transferred to Brigham Young University.” While attending BYU, Brenda joined a “young adult ward”—an LDS student congregation—where she met Allen Lafferty. “Allen wasn’t a student, but for some reason he started attending that student ward in Provo,” LaRae explains. “He had a lot of charisma, they hit it off, and they just started going together.” “When Brenda started going out with Allen, I was out of the country, on a mission in Argentina,” her sister Betty says. “But she wrote to me every week, and I could tell she was pretty serious about this guy. She’d dated a lot of boys before, but she never got stuck on any one person. Allen was different. He was a returned missionary, and the Laffertys were the picture-perfect LDS family. Everybody in Provo seemed to know them. Plus, Allen is a charmer—all the Lafferty boys have this ability to charm the socks off you. They have this look in their eyes. And Brenda fell for it. Even from Argentina it was obvious she was really in love with Allen.” On April 22, 1982, Allen and Brenda were sealed for time and eternity as husband and wife in the Salt Lake City temple. She was twenty-one years old. At BYU, where Brenda majored in communications, she anchored a television newsmagazine program on KBYU—the local PBS affiliate broadcast throughout Utah on channel 11. According to Betty, “Her ambition was to become an anchorwoman like Michelle King. * We were brought up to be very independent. Our parents taught us that we were given certain talents and we needed to pursue them—that we shouldn’t go through life relying on others when we had all these abilities. “Then Brenda got married, and Allen didn’t want her to work, so she kind of put her broadcasting career on the shelf temporarily, and took a lower-profile job at Castleton’s, one of the nicer stores at the Orem Mall, just to get insurance and help support the family. But Allen started pressuring her to quit that job, too, because he wanted her to be a traditional, subservient wife. He wanted her to be totally reliant on him.” According to LaRae, “Brenda really wanted a career in broadcast journalism. We found out later, after the fact, that she had been offered a job at BYU, teaching in the communications department.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  A serious limitation of the pathology perspective is its one-dimensional view of sexual troubles. Although I’ve never met anyone who was happy to have a sex problem, I’ve worked with dozens whose unwelcome symptoms turned out to be opportunities for growth. Not only did their problems push them to confront patterns that were depriving them of satisfaction, but as they searched for better alternatives they found new levels of self-respect and confidence. Time and again I’ve learned from my clients that it’s not so much whether they have problems but how inventively they deal with them that most determines their degree of wellness. According to the paradoxical perspective, grappling with life’s dilemmas is a central and unavoidable aspect of the erotic adventure. Once we grasp this truth, we can’t possibly visualize healthy eroticism as a fixed, problem-free state—nor should this be our ideal. Erotic well-being expands as we acknowledge and integrate contradictory emotions and motivations within ourselves, while also learning to cope with them in others. Those on the path to erotic health discover that problems and potentials are two aspects of a whole. Unfortunately, there’s no simple way to gauge how effectively a person is rising to these challenges. Nonetheless, implicit in the paradoxical perspective are vital indicators—I call them signposts—many of which are already familiar to you. The best way to evaluate where you are on the road to wellness is to review some of the noteworthy abilities you’ve been actively cultivating while reading this book: • Enjoying peak experiences while also using them as avenues to self-awareness (Chapter 1) • Recognizing and accepting the role of emotions—including “negative” ones—in your turn-ons (Chapter 4) • Identifying childhood challenges and psychic wounds that fuel your strongest passions (Chapters 3 and 5) • Acknowledging when ingrained sexual scripts are working against you (Chapters 6 and 7) • Knowing when and how to commit to necessary, self-affirming changes (Chapter 8) • Building an “interactive zone” between love and lust (Chapters 6 and 9) Only someone who knows you extremely well can assess how comfortable you are with these abilities, which is why I suggest you do it yourself. As long as you don’t take this exercise too seriously, try rating yourself either low, medium, or high for each signpost. Low means you haven’t yet thought much about that skill or else you’re having troubling making it work for you. Use a medium rating wherever you see progress, even if it’s sporadic or tentative. High is for signposts that have become regular—though imperfect—aspects of your eroticism.

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  I’ve never been able to keep a copy of this book for long. And to me, that’s the ultimate compliment. I will continue to buy this book for all of my friends who borrow it and never return it. We’re worth it. Violet Blue San Francisco INTRODUCTION In 1998, I published the first edition of this book, which was titled When the Earth Moves: Women and Orgasm. Since then, I have received numerous letters from readers telling me how much their sex lives have improved as a result of this book. This edition is a little shorter and easier on the eyes, with the addition of sidebars and anatomy illustrations. I have deleted my personal story of healing from a childhood of sexual abuse, as that story is now available in my memoir (My Sweet Wild Dance), although you will still find many references to my own experience throughout the text. In the last twelve years, with the advent of the Internet, a number of forums for discussion about sex have opened up. Some very good books about sex have been written, and books about sex are more easily available than ever. In most parts of the Western world, sex is generally accepted as a normal and delightful human activity, and children are offered real opportunities for education about sex. In spite of the religious right, we are no longer stuck in the days when women were told, sex is dirty, save it for your husband. And still, we have a way to go in the process of waking up to the true depth and breadth of human sexuality. Sexuality is both a great gift and a valuable tool that can enable us to experience the wisdom and joy of our bodies and help us to express our creativity. I believe that a healthy sex life makes for a healthy person, and I am unwilling to define what healthy means for anyone but myself. I would like all of us to have the freedom to self-define, and I am very grateful that I have been fortunate enough to reach a place in my life where I am able to enjoy unbridled sexual passion. My initial inspiration in writing this book was the desire to share the insights and understandings that I have grasped in the personal process of stepping into my sexual power—a long but very rewarding journey that healed me on a deep level, taking me to a place of great appreciation for the extraordinary potential we have as human beings.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  into virtual prisons. Across the street from one massive factory was a playground. The unintended lesson was to “teach the children that property is afraid of the people—their people.” 62 He offered varied portraits of poor whites, defending “restlessness” and refusing to call it shiftlessness. Daniels liked what he saw in Norris, Tennessee, a planned town that was part of the TVA. It was not the photoelectric cell lighting and heating of the big school building that impressed him so much as the “collision of children” inside the school—the “hill children of the big, poor families” alongside the children of engineers. Here was a clear-cut experiment in class desegregation. If only this was America, he thought. 63 As Ma Joad from The Grapes of Wrath had put it, Daniels repeated for his southern audience: the poor are always coming. He praised the TVA for discovering that ordinary southern whites were receptive to training if given a fair chance. Some, he acknowledged, were “underfed,” some “feeble-minded, perverted, insane.” But they could not represent the whole poor population— or the future . It was not only pellagra or illiteracy that stood in the way of their rise; there was also the fear of the wealthier classes that poor whites, like blacks, might not be willing to stay in their place. Daniels refuted the “slander” that had been perpetuated by the educated classes, and he made sure his readers took heed: “The Southern Negro is not an incurably ignorant ape. The Southern white masses are not biologically degenerate.” 64 Daniels was unwavering in his belief that Jeffersonian democracy had long since died, only to be replaced by demagogues on the order of Huey Long, who, following on the heels of generations of southern patricians, plundered the people at will. He took up Odum’s cautionary advice, insisting that all planning for southern revival had to start at the bottom if it was to effect anything approaching real change. “Maybe still one Reb can beat ten Yankees,” wrote Daniels. But “it is irrelevant.” Rebel pride had blinded all classes. “The tyrants and the plutocrats and the poor all need teaching. One of them no more than the others.” Odum, Agee, and Daniels all wanted to see the South rescued from its ideological trap. They were not cynical; they were hopeful. They recognized that simple solutions—a smattering of prettified homesteads—were no cure. Something grander, on the scale of the TVA, represented the only chance to shake up the existing consensus and rearrange class structure. 65 In the 1930s, the forgotten man and woman became a powerful symbol of economic struggle all across America. A good number of voices paid special attention to poor whites who haunted the South. The problem was not: “No one knows what to do with him.” It was this: “No one wants to see him as he really is: one of us, an American.” CHAPTER TEN The Cult of the Country Boy

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  No scoring system can possibly capture the subtle manifestations of such complex indicators. Even so, your ratings do contain hints about where your erotic health is thriving and where it may be limited or stalled. Focus first on your highest ratings because they’re inspiring; they show what you’re capable of. Because of the mundane connotations of medium ratings, you might assume your progress on these signposts is merely average and of minimal importance. In actuality, medium-rated signposts are likely to be on the cutting edge of your erotic development. Here you can often find an inner struggle, perhaps quite subtle, between a genuine desire to grow and an urge to play it safe. Clarifying that struggle is a major step. It’s tempting to look down at a low rating but try not to. This isn’t a test, and your ratings aren’t grades. Besides, low ratings are as informative as any other kind. Ask yourself: “Does this signpost make any sense to me? If so, what’s preventing me from working with it? Am I indifferent? Or could I be avoiding or rejecting something about it?” Unless you’re simply indifferent, a low rating may be a sign that you’re holding back and is there-fore a quiet call to action. If you can identify just one small step to ease you forward, so much the better. If you find yourself formulating signs of health more meaningful than any I have suggested so far, honor them. Health indicators that come from firsthand experience are especially likely to affect your actions. Write about them or talk to an intimate friend or lover. Of course, not every idea stands up to scrutiny. But with rare exceptions, those who make an effort to define what healthy eroticism means to them ultimately become its promoters. There’s no better way to become engaged with the great issues of erotic health than to review the highlights of your voyage of self-discovery. Now that you have launched that review, the time has come to add several other signposts to your list, ones we’ve touched on only briefly or indirectly before. Yet I’m sure you’ll sense interconnections with the fundamental themes of your journey: • Clarifying your personal values, including: • respecting self and others • facing your erotic shadow • claiming the responsibilities of freedom • Differentiating fantasy from action • Nurturing children’s sexuality • Appreciating erotic diversity

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  In some societies, sex is regarded as a sacred act; in others it is regarded as an act of profanity. Yet there are women all over the world who experience sex as fulfilling and empowering. For many of us it can be deeply transformative and healing, bringing us to the realization that we are much more than physical bodies confined by the limits of flesh and blood. No matter what our sexual or spiritual orientation may be, we can use sex as the doorway to a profound personal awakening. I must say something about that word spiritual. Because it denotes a concept that many people find alienating, it’s not a word I use very much. I am well aware that some people close off as soon as they hear or read it. However, our language is appallingly limited when it comes to discussing anything outside the physical arena. Because sex takes so many of us to a place beyond the physical, I find it impossible to discuss orgasm in any depth without referring to the spiritual, simply because there is no other word. I ask those of you who find that word difficult to transpose over it whatever meaning works for you. Above all, please do not equate it with any concept of God, gods, goddesses, or religions of any denomination. Because sex is such an individual experience, it is vital to illustrate the huge variety of our sexual responses and feelings. In the course of writing this book, I interviewed twenty-six women and three men in considerable detail about their sex lives. My questionnaire (see Appendix C) was posted online and circulated by hand. The italicized quotes appearing throughout the book are from responses to the questionnaire or from the interviews, and they are credited where the individual requested it. (See Acknowledgments.) I have occasionally used a pseudonym where a discussion involves quoting from the same person several times. A few of the people quoted are personal friends who engaged in ongoing conversations with me in the process of my writing. These include Barbara, Laura, Joy, Jean, Victoria, Donna, Lisa, Terry, and Jesse, who was my lover at the time. I have also included my own experiences where they are relevant. The women who are leading the way in the process of sexual reclamation are heterosexual, lesbian, and bisexual. Women who make love with other women have a vast body of firsthand information and a unique outlook on female sexuality. Therefore, while I have included a high proportion of heterosexual input, much of the information I’ve presented is gleaned directly from lesbians and bisexual women. The value of their perceptions is not confined to same-sex relationships; it is very relevant to heterosexual women interested in expanding their sexual practices.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  M Elvis Presley, Andy Griffith, and LBJ’s Great Society I’m a self-confessed raw country boy and guitar-playing fool. —Elvis Presley (1956) Lyndon wasn’t upper class at all. Country boy, grown up in the hills. —Virginia Foster Durr, Alabama civil rights activist (1991) ost will remember the famous photograph of Elvis Presley standing alongside President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office. But why is it forgotten that Presley gained the friendship of Lyndon Baines Johnson? At Graceland, Presley added a three-television console like the one LBJ had in the Oval Office; “the King” also hung in his home an “All the Way with LBJ” bumper sticker from the 1964 presidential campaign, and posed for a publicity photo with the president’s daughter, Lynda Bird Johnson, who at the time was dating the actor George Hamilton. Presley and Johnson at first seem to be the oddest of couples—but they had more in common than their separate celebrity worlds would suggest. Both became national figures who challenged—whose very lives disrupted—the historically toxic characterization of poor whites. 1 When Elvis stormed onto the national scene in 1956, he seemed to be doing everything he could to act nonwhite. He openly embraced black musical style, black pompadour hair, and flashy outfits that had been associated with blacks as well. His gyrations caused his critics to compare his wildly sexualized dancing to the “hootchy-kootchy,” or burlesque striptease, and the rebellious zoot suit crowd. His phenomenal fame and adoring fans helped to propel him to The Ed Sullivan Show, and from there to the silver screen. He soon owned a stable of Cadillacs. Elvis had achieved what no white trash working-class male had ever dreamt possible: he was at once cool and sexually transgressive and a “country boy.” No longer a freakish rural outcast, as in the past, Elvis was a “Hillbilly Cat,” someone many teenage boys wished they could be. 2 Lyndon Johnson’s sudden elevation to the office of chief executive on November 22, 1963, came as a great shock to the nation. Eerily replaying what had happened a century earlier, a second unelected Johnson entered the presidency after a shocking assassination. But this time, instead of the sorrow- laden, war-weary Lincoln, the nation had lost the vigorous, photogenic, East

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Coast elite John F. Kennedy. In the wake of tragedy, the seasoned southern politician pursued an aggressive legislative agenda in favor of civil rights and social reform—the most dramatic foray since FDR. The “Great Society,” as his vast array of programs became known, called for the elimination of poll taxes and voting discrimination, the promotion of education and health care funding, and daring new programs in an effort to eradicate poverty. Yet what made LBJ different from his Democratic predecessor was the necessity that he reinvent himself by shedding the predictable trappings of a southern backwater identity— which he did without unlearning his famous Texan drawl. The accidental president had to transform how he was perceived on television, how he was judged by Washington reporters, how he was received as a national leader. Though Johnson had a proven record as a New Dealer and modern progressive, on the national stage he was still regarded as a regional figure. He refused to go easy on white rule in the South. In his 1965 inaugural address, he made progressive change a matter of national survival. He wanted to use his powers to work toward broad social equality. 3 In many ways, Johnson’s insistence on change echoed what the sociologist Howard Odum had prescribed in earlier decades: southerners had to free themselves from their misplaced nostalgia for the Old Confederacy. He wasn’t afraid of modernity. “I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of ants,” Johnson put it bluntly upon inauguration in 1965. Mindless conformity, whether Soviet or southern in style, was stifling and repressive. 4 His heroes had not been Andrew Johnson or James K. Vardaman; Franklin Roosevelt was the politician he most admired. During the Depression, Johnson was a strong proponent of rural electrification, and he ran the jobs corps program, the National Youth Administration, in Texas. He had no patience for country-bumpkin antics either. LBJ loved modern technology, campaigned across Texas by prop plane before World War II, and was the first to use a helicopter in his Senate campaign of 1948. That year, winning in a close race, he presented himself as a worldly politician, jettisoning the folksy style of his opponent, whom a Johnson aide described as “old hat, old ways, old everything.” As majority leader of the Senate, and during his vice presidency as chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, it was Lyndon Johnson who first promoted “stepping into the space race” and making it a national priority to put a man on the moon. 5

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  The wedding story of Mary and George Oppen is one of the only straight-people stories I know in which the marriage is made more romantic by virtue of its being a sham. Here is their story: One night in 1926, Mary went out on a date with George, whom she knew just a little from a college poetry class. As Mary remembers it: “He came for me in his roommate’s Model T Ford, and we drove out to the country, sat and talked, made love, and talked until morning…. We talked as we had never talked before, an outpouring.” Upon returning to their dorms in the morning, Mary found herself expelled; George was suspended. They then took off together, hitchhiking on the open road. Before meeting George, Mary had decided firmly against marriage, considering it to be a “disastrous trap.” But she also knew that traveling together without being married put her and George at risk with the law, via the Mann Act—one of the many laws in U.S. history ostensibly passed to prosecute unequivocally bad things like sexual slavery, but which in actuality has been used to harass anyone whose relationships the state deems “immoral.” So in 1927, Mary got married. Here is her account of that day: Although I had a strong conviction that my relationship with George was not an affair of the State, the threat of imprisonment on the road frightened us, so we went to be married in Dallas. A girl we met gave me her purple velvet dress, her boyfriend gave us a pint of gin. George wore his college roommate’s baggy plus-fours, but we did not drink the gin. We bought a ten-cent ring and went to the ugly red sandstone courthouse that still stands in Dallas. We gave my name, Mary Colby, and the name George was using, “David Verdi,” because he was fleeing from his father. And so Mary Colby marries David Verdi, but she never precisely marries George Oppen. They give the state the slip, along with George’s wealthy family (who by this point had hired a private eye to find them). That slip then becomes a sliver of light filtering into their house for the next fifty-seven years. Fifty-seven years of baffling the paradigm, with ardor. I have long known about madmen and kings; I have long known about feeling real. I have long been lucky enough to feel real, no matter what diminishments or depressions have come my way. And I have long known that the moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you. So why did your ex’s digs about playing house sting so bright? Sometimes one has to know something many times over. Sometimes one forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets again. As with knowledge, so too, with presence. If the baby could speak to the mother, says Winnicott, here is what it might say: I find you;

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  he was “not some cornball rural hick.” Nevertheless, like the southern politician of the hillbilly school, LBJ loved to be flamboyant. On the campaign trail, he used his Texas vernacular to forge an intimate bond with the crowds. One columnist praised him for “digging down deeply into the basic urges of ordinary people.” Country-boy traits treated as liabilities before 1963 suddenly became an asset as the nation grieved the loss of its young president. 79 In 1963, LBJ’s tour in Kentucky included photographs of the president conversing with poor Appalachian families. #215-23-64, Inez Kentucky, LBJ Library Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas Johnson’s signature set of programs known as the Great Society attached to a different, and positive, variant of his southern identity. Upon passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, the president flew to Stonewall, Texas, to sign the bill at the one-room schoolhouse where he had taught during the Great Depression. While there, he referred to himself as the “son of a sharecropper.” His willingness to tackle poverty could be traced to his embrace of a modern South. In 1960, when he first ran for president, he echoed Howard Odum’s creed: his goal was to prevent a “waste of resources, waste of lives, or waste of opportunity.” By the time he launched the Great Society, the legislation he promoted focused on two distinct classes: the poor urban black population and the mountain folk of Appalachia. Seeing the Great Society as the

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  RECOGNIZING AND SEIZING OPPORTUNITIESThere’s a Buddhist saying: When the student is ready, the teacher will come. Sometimes that teacher is another person—a mentor, guide, or role model who challenges you to stretch your limits, while instilling confidence that you can to it. More often, life itself is the teacher, but only for those ready and able to follow an uncharted course. Whether we notice or not, life regularly invites us to step outside the constraints imposed by our habits. Unfortunately, most invitations go unanswered. Whenever you make a mindful choice to respond differently than usual, combining awareness with concrete action, your goals and motivations make a leap toward actualization. Your decisions need not be dramatic to be effective. Even the smallest changes, when consciously chosen, make successive ones increasingly tangible and gratifying. Carlos revisited: Allowing connection Caught on the horns of a self-hating dilemma, Carlos, the unhappy voyeur you met in the last chapter, had learned in early adolescence to use inferiority as an aphrodisiac. Once he confronted how his CET magnetically drew him to idealized but unreachable men and dangerous situations, he faced many choices. For him, a major step was to disengage from locker room spying and venture into gay sex clubs, a world of consensual sex that sometimes leads to dates and occasionally even relationships. Some people may have trouble seeing how engaging in casual sex could be a sign of growth, but for Carlos it was. He had a strict safe sex policy so he could explore his sexuality without life-threatening consequences. I remember his delight at spending hours with men who were as enthusiastic as he. Of course, the men whom he considered most perfectly masculine and frustrat-ingly aloof invariably attracted him most. But there were other men who pursued him, a totally new experience he didn’t know how to handle. Though it wasn’t easy, he coaxed himself into not turning away. He knew that learning to accept positive attention was the only alternative to the searing pain of constant rejection. Whenever Carlos was in emotional turmoil, however, his masturbation fantasies reverted to voyeurism. He noticed that his self-esteem took a nose-dive as he worshipped the objects of his desire. As a result of this awareness, he began to wonder what would happen if he were to celebrate his appreciation of the male form, to feel enriched by a man’s beauty rather than demeaned by it. This became the central question of his therapy and his life. Gradually, Carlos experimented—in both fantasy and behavior—with positioning himself more favorably in relation to men he admired. His initial discovery probably won’t surprise you: inferiority was sexier. Equality, however, was infinitely more gratifying. The only people who can fully comprehend this distinction are those who know firsthand the intensity of eroticized self-hatred.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  who dreamt of acquiring a meaningful tract of land. Johnson retained his own attachment to the “harsh caliche soil” of the Texas hill country, acknowledging that his strength came from the “rough, unyielding sticky clay soil.” Lady Bird Johnson felt that it was the land of his youth that made him so unrelenting in his politics. Johnson reversed the older notion that living on wasteland killed the human spirit. Instead of being stuck in the clay, Johnson saw himself as having surmounted his class origins with the same drive that was needed to overcome the unforgiving land. 90 James Reston of the New York Times captured Johnson on the day of his inauguration in 1965. Here was a man speaking both the “faith of the old frontier” and the new frontier of science. Here was a man who “spoke every word as if it was his last”; “nobody watching him up close could doubt his sincerity.” In LBJ, Reston found a full-blown “dramatization of the American dream,” the “poor boy, the country boy at the pinnacle of the world.” 91 Two weeks later, Johnson spoke to students in the Senate Youth Program. He confidently assured them that it was not important who their ancestors were, or what the color of their skin was, or whether they were born to a tenant farmer and lived in a three-room house. In fact, though, he knew that all these things did matter. The country boy might have been enjoying his moment in the sun just then, but he knew in his heart that his place among the power elite was not really secured; he was not fully accepted. A country boy might at any moment reveal some telltale sign of a white trash character. He might say something inappropriate. He could never conceal the artless drawl or dust off the sticky red clay. Indelible marks of class identity were forever stamped on him, no matter how far he wandered from the inhospitable land of his birth. 92 Part III THE WHITE TRASH MAKEOVER CHAPTER ELEVEN Redneck Roots

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Carlos eventually began dating, cultivated the necessary social skills, and learned to avoid interpreting each man’s reaction to him as a referendum on his worth. Eventually, he moved in with a guy who was handsome and affectionate but not as irresistible as the fantasy guys he continued to stalk in his imagination. This man wanted to love him, and Carlos’s greatest achievement was the decision to receive that affection. If you’re pursuing any kind of erotic transition, large or small, I have a prediction. One day you’ll look back on how far you’ve come and wonder how you did it. I doubt that you’ll recall one pivotal turning point, except perhaps the decision to begin. Like Carlos, most likely you’ll recall a series of unfamiliar and awkward experiments, opportunities seized in spite of—or because of—the risks. Through these experiments you turn the promise of change into a reality. STEP 7:INTEGRATE YOUR DISCOVERIESIf alternative erotic styles are to be more than passing experiments, they must become woven into the fabric of your everyday life. For a lucky few, this integration occurs with relative ease. Especially when modifications are readily satisfying and don’t seriously conflict with older patterns, merely repeating pleasurable new behaviors may be sufficient to establish them. For most people, however, it’s not that easy. I’ve observed dozens of men and women attempt new forms of erotic expression, only to revert to less fulfilling but more predictable ways of being. They found that the most daunting aspect of an erotic transition wasn’t trying new behaviors but making these changes stick. Unless you learn how to do this, your discoveries from the previous steps may, in the end, prove to be futile. Few if any of us follow an uninterrupted path toward our goals. More commonly, we make headway until we come up against some internal or external blockage that tests our motivation. At such moments we may feel as if we’re going backward. These setbacks are among the most common impediments to our development. But it’s not the setbacks themselves that hinder growth. Far more important is how we respond to them. Some people quickly become demoralized, interpret their setbacks as signs of weakness, or perhaps even abandon their goals. When you encounter a setback, I encourage you to view it not as a failure but as an opportunity to integrate change at a deeper level where it’s more likely to take root and flourish. Sometimes this is simply a matter of recognizing reversals as thoroughly human and inevitable, and deciding to persist in spite of them—with as little self-criticism as possible. But I’ve learned from my clients that persistent setbacks serious enough to undermine positive change are, more often than not, signs that a person must wrestle with one or both of two crucial questions: (1) What is the relationship between the changes I seek and how I perceive myself? and (2) How do I deal with my old turn-ons as I practice new ones?

• From How to Be a Great Lover (1999)

  In the next chapter, you will see how lubrication and its application can only increase the pleasure that is related to having fabulous sex without compromising your safety. Safety is essential, but it doesn’t have to ruin the mood or lessen the charge between you and your lover. You should think of the information here as an expression of your respect for yourself, as well as your partner. [image file=image_rsrc1YH.jpg] “Who knew you could accomplish so much with so little?” MALE SEMINAR ATTENDEE, AGE 32 The whole thing happened quite innocently. Early on in her marriage, a woman found she felt drier than she used to because of the birth control she was now using, a method known to cause dryness. After taking a quick shower, she decided to apply some lubricant to herself after her shower and before getting into bed with her husband. They began to kiss and, as will often happen, he slid his hand down to her genital area. Well, he was so proud and turned on by the obvious effect his kisses had on her she couldn’t bear to tell him her wetness wasn’t entirely his doing. Furthermore, he went on to make such mad passionate love to her that night that ten years into their marriage, she’s still secretly applying lubricant to herself before many of their romantic encounters. He still thinks his kisses bring on Niagara Falls and she’s still reaping the benefits. While I’m not, as a rule, a proponent of one lover misleading another, in this particular case it does seem rather harmless, especially since she also keeps a bottle of personal lubricant by the bed at all times, which they use openly whenever they desire. For this reason and many others, I feel personal lubricant is quite simply a treasure. I can’t think of a single store-bought item that does more to enhance the overall pleasure and ease of sexual technique than lubricant. That being so, I am constantly amazed at how many women have yet to discover the amount of joy that can be created from one little bottle. Those of you who have not tried it are in for a treat. As a thirty-nine-year-old male entrepreneur from Sacramento said, “I never knew her hand could feel so good.” Many women in my seminars have said they believe the use of personal lubricant is in some way a poor reflection on them. They tell me they are afraid that if they bring out a bottle of lubricant during lovemaking that their lovers may think they’re incapable of getting excited “naturally.” One woman put it succinctly: “I don’t use it every time, just sometimes to give me a physical jump start when I’m already there mentally.” I’ve also had men tell me that they, too, are afraid to introduce lubricant during sex; from their point of view, they’re afraid we women will think they aren’t exciting enough to get us lubricated. Secret from Lou’s Archives

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  [During] my formative years in New York, nightlife, clubs, and music were safe havens for the creative community. Not just trans people, but a lot of different types of artists, and a lot of different types of gender expression … There were a lot of different ways to make your money without doing sex work or dealing drugs. That’s why I’m so vocal about it: Club culture, for me, is not just entertainment. Still, the profiling by law enforcement persists. Of the “walking while trans” statute, Melissa Gira Grant writes, “Sex workers and anyone perceived to be a sex worker are believed to always be working, or, in the cops’ view, always committing a crime.” The material and social outcomes of such fabricated perception are severe. Of Pleasure Garden, Tourmaline told Artforum, Part of this exhibition has been the experience of me going to Chapter Gallery’s pop-up location on Madison Street, which is literally just three blocks away from the mutual aid society that started Seneca Village and this place owned by the Lyons family that was a refuge for Black sailors. And I’m there, watching people look at this exposed version of me … Tourmaline watches people watch her; watches people take in what are, in fact, exquisite nudes—museum-quality-nudes—and accept or shy away from the pleasure she offers them. She is in control of her image, inviting her own visibility and voyeurism. The art world strives to de-sexualize even its most erotic works; people take such pains to view sexually evocative art seriously and sterile-ly, as though it were impossible for sex to be both hot and serious, for art to be both weighty and wet. Tourmaline’s work is astonishing precisely because it is an invitation to fall softly into the messy erotics of it all; warm and inviting, her images are a party, not a doctor’s appointment. Further, she attacks the glass ceiling of a market oversaturated with nudes; by shifting their context, hers go for tens of thousands of dollars a pop. In preparation for the show, Tourmaline’s gallery sent her a first draft of image descriptions for her self-portraits. In Swallowtail, she reclines in dry grass, corset pulled down and skirt pulled up, pearls caught in her teeth. Her legs are open, and her dick rests between them, peeking out from beneath the white fabric of her gown. I sat with her as she looked over them, visiting her high-rise studio to chat about nothing and look at the city, as I often do. The image description for Swallowtail referenced a visible “phallus”; “I don’t know if I want to use that word,” she said. I asked what she wanted to use, and she said, “What sounds the most fun?” Tourmaline is disinterested in both respectability and—its relative—the discursive sanitizing of the body; I believe she and Benglis have this in common. After all, Benglis says, “I think artists create their own rules—or break them.”

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

  The reference here, therefore, to these experiments is not meant to demonstrate their success. I cannot claim complete success for any experiment. Even medical men can make no such claim for their experiments. My object is only to show that he who would go in for novel experiments must begin with himself. That leads to a quicker discovery of truth, and God always protects the honest experimenter. The risks involved in experiments in cultivating intimate contacts with Europeans were as grave as those in the nature cure experiments. Only those risks were of a different kind. But in cultivating those contacts I never so much as thought of the risks. I invited Polak to come and stay with me, and we began to live like blood brothers. The lady who was soon to be Mrs. Polak and he had been engaged for some years, but the marriage had been postponed for a propitious time. I have an impression that Polak wanted to put some money by before he settled down to a married life. He knew Ruskin much better than I, but his Western surroundings were a bar against his translating Ruskin’s teaching immediately into practice. But I pleaded with him: ‘When there is a heart union, as in your case, it is hardly right to postpone marriage merely for financial consideratons. If poverty is a bar, poor men can never marry. And then you are now staying with me. There is no question of household expenses. I think you should get married as soon as possible. As I have said in a previous chapter, I had never to argue a thing twice with Polak. He appreciated the force of my argument, and immediately opened correspondence on the subject with Mrs. Polak, who was then in England. She gladly accepted the proposal and in a few months reached Johannesburg. Any expense over the wedding was out of the question, not even a special dress was thought necessary. They needed no religious rites to seal the bond. Mrs. Polak was a Christian by birth and Polak a Jew. Their common religion was the religion of ethics.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  She returned for the first time two months later to pick up some clothes. I rushed downstairs when I heard her car pull into the garage. I wanted to hear her say, "How've you been holding up?" or "I missed you" or maybe even "Hello," but instead she walked in and looked down at the cat's litter box, which we kept near the door. "You didn't scoop the litter while I was gone?" she yelled. "Look at this, it's full of shit! Do I have to do everything? What's wrong with you?" She dragged me into the kitchen, grabbed a pair of chopsticks, and hit me. As she lifted her arm again, I said, "Stop hitting me, or I won't live with you." She froze. For the first time, the power balance between me and my mother had shifted.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Pat aggressively, producing tons of campaign materials that included badges, flags, brochures, combs, jewelry, and a variety of buttons, all of which boosted Pat as the ideal suburban homemaker. Party organizers stormed the barricades of suburban shopping centers with “Patmobiles” and “Pat Parades.” Unlike a stunning young Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy decked out in “French couture,” Pat Nixon picked her clothing off the store racks and chose those items she could easily pack. 18 The Nixons hailed from Whittier, in southern California, an area of the Sunbelt that underwent dramatic changes from 1946 to 1970. As millions of Americans bought new homes, suburban enclaves arose in the orbit of metropolitan Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston, Miami, and elsewhere. One of the best-publicized housing developments of the era grew in Levittown on the outskirts of New York City. The Levitts thought big, putting up 17,400 houses and attracting 82,000 residents to their Long Island development. This sweeping success led them to construct two massive subdivisions in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Willingboro, New Jersey. As skilled promoters, the Levitts did more than simply build homes. Like their earliest progenitor, Richard Hakluyt of old Elizabethan England, they were planting self-sustaining colonies in the hinterland. The Levitts imagined suburbs as middle-class consumer outposts, geared for leisure activities: baseball fields, bicycle pathways, and swimming pools complemented commercially zoned areas for shopping centers. 19 The key to the Levitts’ system was not just cheaper housing, but homogeneous populations—in their phrasing, “stabilized” neighborhoods. They meant racial and class homogeneity, which led them to endorse “restrictive covenants” prohibiting owners from selling their homes to black families. The Levitts knew the South, because their first large-scale project was an all-white facility for wartime workers in Norfolk, Virginia. By planting suburbs in quasi- rural areas, the Levitts recognized that the value of land was not determined by industry or commerce. As isolated outposts, land values were tied to the class status of the occupants. Buying a home here required the male breadwinner to have a steady income—a mark of the new fifties middle class. 20 Levittown was dubbed a “garden community.” But the new style of tract homes uneasily occupied this rustic space. During the fifties, the pastoral image of suburbs was applied to all kinds of bedroom communities. Popular magazines featured wives tending their gardens, husbands grilling at their barbecues. This was a fanciful recasting of the Jeffersonian ideal: suburbanites were the new, let

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  To help you solidify positive changes, make a point of recognizing how each one coincides or conflicts with your self-image. Don’t be surprised if you can’t determine this easily. Live with new behaviors and ways of thinking about yourself for a while and notice how readily you become comfortable with them. If you find yourself avoiding the very things you think you want, consider this an indicator that your current identity is incompatible with the direction of your growth. It takes considerable courage to initiate the necessary shift in identity, but the process is quite straightforward if you decide to pursue it. The most important thing is to continue exploring the changes you’re having trouble integrating. But instead of avoiding discomfort when it arises, let yourself feel it, and eventually you’ll learn about its source. Had Regina run away from her kind boyfriend as she often wanted to, she would never have confronted her internal reluctance to receive love. Only after she saw how her self-image was restraining her could she consciously begin to modify it. How can identity be modified? Unfortunately, no easy answers exist. But I’m convinced that it’s much simpler to add new self-perceptions to your identity than it is to banish old ones. In fact, if you struggle too fiercely with established beliefs, they will likely grow stronger. Rather than trying to get rid of or suppress self-defeating beliefs, you’ll do much better if you concentrate on bolstering emerging beliefs that foster choice and self-affirmation. Sure you’ll experience some inner conflict, maybe a lot. But as your new beliefs grow sufficiently strong, they will show you how to deal effectively with the old ones and reduce their damaging effects. It also helps if you highlight aspects of your current identity that you can embrace wholeheartedly. Your identity is multidimensional and undoubtedly includes many features you can feel good about. Regina, for example, disliked her tendency to act as if she deserved mistreatment. At the same time, she appreciated her boldness, her willingness to take chances and, if necessary, to break the rules. She had always been a fighter, a characteristic that had helped her survive despite her antiself inclinations. Recognizing, respecting, and expressing one’s positive qualities stimulates an enlargement of identity and increases self-esteem. Because identity unfolds gradually as you grow up, altering it requires time and patience. Making room in your self-image for new potentials is a labor of love. Only those who decide they are worthy of that love can mobilize the necessary persistence. Then the expansion of identity becomes profoundly uplifting. One of the greatest joys comes from perceiving something old and familiar in a whole new light.