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 Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  "If the women smile, see, then the men gotta get their shoes shined, to show that they're good sports and that they go along with it; and to put me back in my place just a little. It's a game we play. That's all. I got friends from all over the world that I made out here. People come back here every year, just to take their picture with me!"

• From Controversies of the Early Christian History (2013)

  140 Lecture 21: Is the Old Testament a Christian Book? Sophia fell from the pleroma. This God was a lower, ignorant divinity, sometimes portrayed as evil. o For orthodox Christians, this view was not acceptable. In fact, the God of the Old Testament is the God of Jesus; he not only created the world, but he called Israel to be his people. He gave them his Law through Moses. It was right for Jews to keep the Law literally, but the coming of Jesus had ful fi lled the Law so that it no longer needed to be followed.  Another reason that orthodox Christians decided to retain the Old Testament is that it alone provided antiquity for the Christian religion. o Unlike the modern world, the world of antiquity valued the ancient over the novel. For a philosophy or a religion to be right, it had to be ancient. o Christians answered charges that their recently developed religion couldn’t possibly be right by saying that the Jewish Bible belonged to them and that it predicted Jesus. In fact, Moses and the Prophets were Christians, anticipating that Jesus would arrive. o By holding on to the Old Testament, Christians could claim antiquity for their religion, and they did so explicitly. They pointed out that Moses was 400 years older than Homer and 800 years older than Plato, and he had predicted Jesus. Christianity, then, is older than anything in pagan and Greek philosophical circles. o Moreover, in Genesis 1, when God says, “Let us make man in our own image,” he is talking to Jesus, the preexistent one. Jesus existed with God before the beginning of time.  In the end, Christians took over the Jewish scriptures and called them their own. For orthodox Christians, the Old Testament became a Christian book, not a Jewish one. 141 Ehrman, After the New Testament. Harnack, Marcion. 1. Summarize two early Christian views of the Old Testament to show their sharp differences. 2. Why do you think, in the long run, the Christians decided to keep the Old Testament as part of their scripture? Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  22 Lecture 3: The First Cultural Context—Judaism opposed to foreigners and those who accommodated them. The Sadducees identified themselves with the Temple and the Sanhedrin (the Jewish court) but preserved them through cooperation with foreigners. o The sect that represented the future of Judaism, the Pharisees, remained politically neutral and centered their community commitment on the observance of Torah, reinterpreted through scribal technique (midrash). • Jews within Palestine expressed resistance to Greek culture and Roman rule in a variety of ways. o The active aggressive stance was found among those, such as the Zealots, who battled for Jewish liberation through the Jewish War (67–70 C.E.) and the Bar Kochba revolt (132–135 C.E.). o The passive resistance stance was found among those, such as the Maccabean mother and sons, who suffered martyrdom in witness to Torah rather than abandon the Law. o The stance of imaginative resistance was found among writers of apocalyptic literature, whose highly symbolic and dualistic reading of history imagined the reversal of fortunes brought about by God. Within this literature, we find the development of two fundamental convictions that would influence Christianity: a belief in the resurrection of the dead and a belief in the coming of a messiah. o The stance of physical withdrawal was found among the Essenes at the Dead Sea (Qumran), who created an alternative life based on a distinctive interpretation of the Law and saw themselves as the fulfillment of Torah’s prophecies. o The stance of ritual resistance was found among the Pharisees, whose practice of purity laws made it possible to live among those different from them and whose highly flexible midrashic 23 interpretation of the commandments made the sect capable of surviving the destruction of the Temple. The Pharisees and the Christians • After the destruction of the Temple at the end of the Jewish War, two groups of Jews emerged as rivals for the heritage of Israel: the Pharisees, whose dedication to Torah would develop into classical Talmudic Judaism, and the Christians, whose central symbol of a crucified and raised Messiah was even more adaptable to new circumstances. Both found their future as intentional communities, or associations, within the empire. • In the next lecture, we’ll learn about the Jesus movement and the birth of Christianity and see how this new “thing” in the Mediterranean world created profound tensions within the symbolic world of Judaism. The Essenes at Qumran near the Dead Sea adopted a stance of physical and ritual withdrawal; their interpretation of themselves as the fulfillment of Torah’s prophecies mirrored later Christians’ interpretations of themselves in relation to Torah. © iStockphoto/Thinkstock. 24 Lecture 3: The First Cultural Context—Judaism Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. 1. In what ways was the Judaism of the 1 st century different from the religion of ancient Israel? 2. How did the powerful influences of Greek and Roman culture help shape the Judaism within which Christianity emerged? Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  148 Lecture 20: The Distinctive Issues of the Latin West o Strongly influenced by Ambrose in Milan, Augustine converted to Christianity in 386 and, despite his protests that he was ill- prepared, was ordained a priest in the North African city of Hippo in 391; he was elected bishop in 395. o After a lifetime of prodigious pastoral and literary effort, he died in 430 as the Vandals laid siege to the city of Hippo. o If Ambrose provided the political posture and Jerome the biblical learning that shaped the subsequent West, Augustine was the supreme source of its intellectual vision. Augustine’s Influence • Augustine’s Confessions is not only a classic account of conversion, but it also introduced a sense of interiority, of “self,” that was distinctive. His remarkable self-awareness is revealed, as well, in his Retractions, written shortly before his death, in which he reviewed, criticized, and amended each of his voluminous writings. • Augustine’s polemical and doctrinal works provided fundamental guidance for subsequent theology. o His anti-Manichaean works established a sense of the church and of the material order as positive. Despite his attraction to the ascetical life, he developed a principled defense of the created order: the goodness of the body, food, marriage, and children. o His work on the Trinity introduced a profound “psychological” model for understanding the inner life of the Christian God, suggesting that the path of introspection by one created in the image of God might plumb something of God’s inner life. o His writings against Donatism and Pelagianism asserted, on one side, the importance of the church as an inclusive body of sinners and, on the other side, the necessity of divine grace for any human goodness. On both sides, he emphasized the frailty of humans and the sovereignty and mercy of God. 149 • Augustine’s sermons and biblical commentaries brought both literal and allegorical methods into creative harmony, while his tractate On Christian Doctrine provided a framework for all subsequent medieval interpretation of the Bible. • His City of God, begun in 413 in response to the Visigoth sacking of Rome in 410 and the pagan charge that Christianity was responsible for the fall of the empire, provided a political theology that had a profound impact on medieval church and society. His vision of a society on earth that sought to embody and foreshadow the “city of God” in heaven was a vision that was distinctively Christian, owing little or nothing to classical antecedents. Brown, Augustine of Hippo. V on Campenhausen (Hoffman, trans.), The Fathers of the Latin Church. 1. How did the characteristic problems of Latin Christianity in the 4 th and 5th centuries differ from controversies in the East? 2. Discuss the distinctive political, literary, and theological contributions made respectively by the three doctors, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  161 • The churches of San Vitale and Sant’Apollinare in the imperial city of Ravenna in Italy, as well as the Great Palace in Constantinople, display magnificent frescoes and mosaics in honor of God and the imperial family. • Under Justinian, the literary arts of history and poetry flourished. But the emperor’s whim also led to the state closure of the neoplatonic Academy in Athens in 529. It had been a real and symbolic center of Greek culture for almost 1,000 years. o The Pandidakterion (sometimes called a “university”) of Constantinople was founded in 425 under Theodosius II; Justinian used its resources in his architectural and legal initiatives. o The school had 31 chairs for such subjects as arithmetic, geometry, law, medicine, music, and rhetoric; 16 chairs teaching in Greek; and 15 chairs teaching in Latin. It flourished as a shining example of higher learning until the 9 th century and survived in diminished form for hundreds more years. Efforts at Religious Unity • In religious matters, Justinian was a staunch defender of the Nicene Creed and made real if unsuccessful efforts to achieve unity within the empire in matters of doctrine. • As part of his policy of embracing the western part of the empire and seeking to restore it as part of a unified state, Justinian recognized the primacy of the bishop of Rome in 528 and maintained the doctrinal definition of Chalcedon, reversing the monophysite position that had dominated the empire since 483. • At the same time, he sought to placate the strong monophysite advocates in Constantinople—not least Theodora—tendencies that he also increasingly shared. o In the Theopaschite controversy (the term refers to a member of the Trinity suffering on the cross), Justinian adopted this

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  174 Lecture 24: Eastern Orthodoxy—Holy Tradition o In 862, the emperor Michael III sent them to Moravia (a territory east of the present Czech Republic), where they began to teach in the vernacular they had earlier learned. o Cyril then invented the Glagolithic alphabet (Cyrillic), which became the medium for the translation of the Bible into Slavic and the development of a substantial ecclesiastical literature in Slavic. • Christianity took a firm hold in the Ukraine and Russia through the grand prince Vladimir (d. 1015), who held sway over those lands. He came to the assistance of the emperor Basil II and then married into the imperial family by taking Basil’s sister as his wife in 989. Adopting Orthodoxy, he subsequently imposed it on the territories he had conquered. • Almost immediately after the fall of Constantinople to the Muslims in 1453, the Russian city of Moscow was declared by its propagandists to be the “New Rome” or the “Third Rome,” in the manner that Constantinople had inherited the mantle of the first Rome. o Subsequent history shows how closely the relationship of the Russian patriarch in Moscow and the czars (“Caesars”) mimed the dance of caesaropapism characteristic of Constantinople. Indeed, as the title of a recent study of Stalin suggests (The Court of the Red Czar), such influence continued even after the fall of the Russian Empire. o Nevertheless, Orthodoxy was able both to survive and thrive in this new geographical context and escaped eradication by Islam. The Liturgy of the Orthodox Tradition • Orthodoxy in Byzantium also had great internal energy. The most visible and, in many ways, the most impressive expression of faith within the Orthodox tradition is its public worship, or liturgy. Through the centuries, the liturgy has provided a powerful attraction to this version of Christianity.

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

  I took considerable pains over drawing up this petition. I read all the literature available on the subject. My argument centred round a principle and an expedience. I argued that we had a right to the franchise in Natal, as we had a kind of franchise in India. I urged that it was expedient to retain it, as the Indian population capable of using the franchise was very small. Ten thousand signatures were obtained in the course of a fortnight. To secure this number of signatures from the whole of the province was no light task, especially when we consider that the men were perfect strangers to the work. Specially competent volunteers had to be selected for the work, as it had been decided not to take a single signature without the signatory fully understanding the petition. The villages were scattered at long distances. The work could be done promptly only if a number of workers put their whole heart into it. And this they did. All carried out their allotted task figures of Sheth Dawud Muhammad, Rustomji, Adamji Miyakhan, and Amad Jiva rise clearly before my mind. They brought in the largest number of signatures. Dawud Sheth kept going about in his carriage the whole day. And it was all a labour of love, not one of them asking for even his out-of-pocket expenses. Dada Abdulla’s house became at once a caravanserai and a public office. A number of educated fiends who helped me and many others had their food there. Thus every helper was put to considerable expense. The petition was at last submitted. A thousand copies had been printed for circulation and distribution. It acquainted the Indian public for the first time with conditions in Natal. I sent copies to all the newspapers and publicists I knew. The Times of Inida, in a leading article on the petition, strongly supported the Indian demands. Copies were sent to journals and publicists in England representing different parties. The London Times supported our claims, and we began to entertain hopes of the Bill being vetoed. It was now impossible for me to leave Natal. The Indian friends surrounded me on all sides and importuned me to remain there permanently. I expressed my difficulties. I had made up my mind not to stay at public expense. I felt it necessary to set up an independent household. I thought that the house should be good and situated in a good locality of the community, unless I lived in a style usual for barristers. And it seemed to me to be impossible to run such a household with anything less than 300 a year. I therefore decided that I could stay only if the members of the community guaranteed legal work to the extent of that minimum, and I communicated my decision to them.

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

  As Williams says, context is, indeed, everything, and the point of the nude woman seems to be precisely that she is out of context. What could easily be pornographic if hosted by a different website is, in the context of an art talk: edgy, interesting, transgressive, boundary-pushing. What occurs is actually so popular a sexual fantasy that it has its own porn category: CMNF, or Clothed Male Nude Female. Koons’s Made in Heaven pieces were, too, defined by context. David Littlejohn covered Koons’s 1992 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, citing a placard at the entrance of the gallery housing the controversial pieces, which warned viewers “that these images are not pornographic because ‘they do not invite the participation of the viewer,’ [Littlejohn’s emphasis] and because they show real, identifiable, nonfantasy people (who are, indeed, married).” But for all the hemming and hawing of what makes something art versus pornography, the answer is simple: the sale price. Art is just more expensive. A few years back, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art hosted an exhibition titled On Our Backs: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work. My friend was commissioned to write about the show, and when she went to see it, she posted photos to her Instagram story of several of the pieces. Her account was immediately deleted for hosting content that went against the platform’s terms of service. Eventually, after public outcry and an influx of messages to Instagram support, it was reinstated. The group show featured the work of Shawné Michaelain Holloway, a digital and performance artist who straddles the sex and art industries, and who likes to play with power. Early in her career, she explained that all of her work serves to “carefully detail/describe one Black gURL’s #identity + xxxperience of sex and pop culture online.” Of the piece on view, a personal project (2012–), Tiana Reid writes, Holloway edited videos and photographs she originally made for the amateur porn website Xtube into a glitchy, but not illegible video. On her website, she describes her time on Xtube as part of a social experiment, an investigation into power dynamics. She writes, “I use these people online just as much as they’re using me,” highlighting how sex can often be transactional even when no money is exchanged. Holloway’s work exists in a variety of contexts, by virtue of her own doing. In an interview for The Quietus, Allan Gardner asked her if she chose to host “a personal project” on Xtube simply because it was her only option—because “community guidelines” on any other platform might ban it. She answered that it wasn’t a practical but an intentional decision:

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  Finally, I thought of what to say. “My relationship with you is different. I took an oath with you. We’re now like blood sisters who tell each other everything, and it’s sacred between us.” She still did not look entirely convinced, so I tried again. “I only told you my father’s secret because you asked for an example, and that was the only one I could tell. All the other secrets people have told me will go with me to my grave.” Her face relaxed. “You really are a little soldier, aren’t you?” “If you mean I can be trusted, yes.” I was proud that she’d entrusted me with a confidence so radical and dangerous. “So you will help me save my marriage with Rupert as well as with Hugo? You did so well with Hugo.” She looked happy for the first time that day. Unwilling to disappoint her when it was apparent her happiness now depended on me, I said yes. I had been willing to help her save her marriage with Hugo, and so far I had succeeded. Now she was asking me to help her save both her marriages, to keep her suspended on her trapeze, to partake in her daring feat. I would be the person on the ground, holding her safety line, ever vigilant to keep her from falling. I would have the close-up view of her trapeze, how she worked the pulleys and leapt from husband to husband, both of them reaching for her as she spun in glorious, airborne freedom. There wasn’t anything as amazing—not on Peyton Place, or The Addams Family, or Bewitched. Her life had elements of all those TV shows, and it was dangerous and thrilling, but it was real. And I’d been cast in an essential role. “Before Rupert gets home from teaching,” she charged on, “we should talk about how you might keep an eye on him while I’m gone.” “Keep an eye on Rupert? What would that entail?” “For instance, if Rupert gets suspicious about me in New York, you should phone me, and, well …” Her hands waved and seemed to reach for something that wasn’t there. She averted her eyes when she said, “I wish I didn’t have to mention this. It’s so unfair. Ever since I fell in love with Rupert I have been absolutely faithful to him.” “Except for Hugo.” “Well, yes, but I was already married to Hugo. That’s different. I’ve been completely faithful to both of them, but I can’t trust either of them when I’m out of town.” I might have pointed out a fault in her reasoning, but as I understood our relationship, she was the mentor and I the apprentice, so it wasn’t my place. Instead I said, “What am I supposed to do, track Rupert like a detective?” A mischievous smile brightened her face. “Not a detective, a spy. A Spy in the House of Love.”

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

  But as I fully appreciated the necessity of a literary training in addition, I started some classes with the help of Mr. Kallenbach and Sjt. Pragji Desai. Nor did I underrate the building up of the body. This they got in the course of their daily routine. For there were no servants on the Farm, and all the work, from cooking down to scavenging, was done by the immates. There were many fruit trees to be looked after, and enough gardening to be done as well. Mr. Kallenbach was fond of gardening and had gained some experience of this work in one of the Governmental model gardens. It was obligatory on all, young and old, who were not engaged in the kitchen, to give some time to gardening. The children had the lion’s share of this work, which included digging pits, felling timber and lifting loads. This gave them ample exercise. They took delight in the work, and so they did not generally need any other exercise or games. Of course some of them, and sometimes all them, malingered and shirked. Sometimes I connived at their pranks, but often I was strict with them, I dare say they did not like the strictness, but I do not recollect their having resisted it. Whenever I was strict, I would, by argument, convince them that it was not right to play with one’s work. The conviction would, however, be short-lived, the next moment they would again leave their work and go to play. All the same we got along, and at any rate they built up fine physiques. There was scarcely any illness on the Farm, though it must be said that good air and water and regular hours of food were not a little responsible for this. A word about vocational training. It was my intention to teach every one of the youngsters some useful manual vocation. For this purpose Mr. Kallenbach went to a Trappist monastery and returned having learnt shoemaking. I learnt it from him and taught the art to such as were ready to take it up. Mr. Kallenbach had some experience of carpentry, and there was another inmate who knew it; so we had a small class in carpentry. Cooking almost all the youngsters knew. All this was new to them. They had never even dreamt that they would have to learn these things some day. For generally the only training that Indian children received in South Africa was in the three R’s. On Tolstoy Farm we made it a rule that the youngsters should not be asked to do what the teachers did not do, and therefore, when they were asked to do any work, there was always a teacher co-operating and actually working with them. Hence whatever the youngsters learnt, they learnt cheerfully. Literary training and character building must be dealt with in the following chapters

• From Action (2014)

  Another line from the Jam’s itinerant boy: Oh, I’m sitting watching rainbows, and watching the people go crazy. While aligning yourself with a specific sexual orientation can open you up to protection and love of all-new magnitudes, you can also move between homes when it comes to embodiments. I never designated myself “straight,” or “gay,” or “bisexual,” depending on whom I was dating/fucking, because to do so made each of those words feel like the bigots who call fluctuating sexualities “faddish” were being thrown sturdy proof, even though that’s bullshit and everyone has the right to claim whatever gender they like for themselves, even if they capitulate. But I did not know how to mean any of these things, and I felt bad for potentially skewing their definitions for the people who did. I wasn’t doing anyone any harm, and it was fine for me to slip on identities as I felt them, but I prefer a mode that draws mainly on the fact that I can hook up with anyone I want, and it doesn’t have to change what I am. I could call myself any one of those things, despite my dalliances outside of their normal confines, and be correct. I don’t want to. I have to say something. Otherwise, how would people know that they’ve got a shot with me, or that I had the wiring to scout them out? Here is as close as I can manage, as far as how a name for my gender identity and sexual orientation might sound: queer. I picture it as a spaceship, or, no—of course, a cruise ship. Picture one of the massive ocean liners in romantic comedies from the 1970s (coincidentally, my favorite aesthetic may be found among the streamers, muted pinks, and dinner gowns native to this decade’s cinematic boats): I am uneasy when people confine me to a specific word when my heart feels as roomy and compartmented as a sea vessel. I am open to whatever kinds of aliens might want to float along on holiday with me.

• From Escape (2007)

  To a little girl, this sounded important and thrilling. It was the one way in my life that I could feel special. Nothing explained why my mother beat me or why my parents argued all the time when my father came home. But Grandma made me feel as though I had been singled out for an important life. I didn’t question my parents’ behavior; it was a fact of life for me. Violence toward children was incorporated into our belief system, and it was very common in the community to see a mother slap one of her children, sometimes very hard. I knew my parents didn’t get along, but I didn’t really see many other parents who did. This was just the way our world worked; I had no way of making comparisons. But whatever happened at home, I knew in my heart that God thought I was special. I knew that the prophet would tell me whom to marry and then I’d produce as many babies as I could. Because I loved my grandmother so much and because this was presented to me as absolute truth, it would be years before I’d even begin to look at any of the premises my life was based upon. The most dramatic story my grandmother ever told me was about the raid at Short Creek, Arizona, on July 26, 1953. The way she told it, the women of the FLDS rallied to protect the work of God. The raid is a key focal point of FLDS history. Grandma told us this story over and over, and it always began the same way—with her dream. Several months before the raid, Grandma dreamed about being with her children in the back of a very old wagon. The prophet, Uncle Roy, was driving the wagon across an old, rickety bridge that was beginning to break apart from the weight of the wagon. Grandma could see that there was a deep ravine below them with a rushing river. She knew that if the bridge collapsed, they’d all be lost forever. But the wagon made it safely to the other side. She knew, in her dream, that Uncle Roy had saved them and that he was the only man who could have done so. Grandma said rumors were rampant that a raid was coming. She put my mother and aunt to bed that night in July and went to the schoolhouse to join in a prayer circle, asking God to keep the armies of the devil at bay. A lookout was posted on the only road coming into town. The young man was supposed to warn the community if he saw the authorities coming by exploding several sticks of dynamite. The blast came. The state of Arizona had launched an invasion. Grandma said the lookout ran into town and fell at the feet of Uncle Roy, shouting, “They are coming, they’re coming, and there are hundreds of them!”

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Borman hadn’t joined NASA for the usual reasons. He had little interest in exploration, adventure, or pioneering. He didn’t thrive on speed or adrenaline. Even the glamorous perks of the job—the availability of beautiful women, discounts on Corvettes, the public’s adoration—meant nothing to him. He’d joined NASA for a single purpose: to fight the Soviet Union on the world’s new battlefield, outer space. Before Slayton’s question could settle, Borman gave his answer. “Yes, Deke. Let’s go to the Moon.” Slayton didn’t need any more than that. He thanked Borman and warned him to keep the information on a need-to-know basis.

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

  T Slumming, Slick Willie, and Sarah Palin A dangerous chasm in the classes is alive and well in the United States of America. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s not. —Carolyn Chute, The Beans of Egypt, Maine (revised, 1995) he Bakker scandal was not enough to stop the stampede toward white trash and redneck chic that prevailed in the eighties and nineties. Margo Jefferson in Vogue called the new rage “slumming.” One of the most surprising confessions in this vein came from John Hillerman, the American actor who played the prim and proper English butler Jonathan Quayle Higgins III on Magnum, P.I. Hillerman said that when he received fan mail from England, where he was claimed as one of their own, he wrote back, “I hate to disappoint you, but I’m a redneck from Texas.” 1 A growing chorus sought to clean up the image, to make “redneck” a term of endearment. Lewis Grizzard, who made a name for himself as a redneck journalist, thought it was time to stop mocking rednecks. He praised the 1993 antidiscrimination ordinance in Cincinnati that made hillbilly a protected class, and he hoped that Atlanta would pass a similar law for rednecks in anticipation of the 1996 Summer Olympics. In Florida, a man was charged under the Hate Crime Statute in 1991 for defaming a policeman by calling him a cracker. For Grizzard, “redneck” meant “agriculturalist,” a person like his father who worked outside and acquired an uneven tan before there was sunscreen. He was wrong, of course, as the long chronology catalogued here has shown. 2 A certain ambiguity remained. Redneck, cracker, and hillbilly were simultaneously presented as an ethnic identity, a racial epithet, and a workingman’s badge of honor. A North Carolina journalist neatly summed up the identity confusion: “If you think you’re a redneck, you think you’re hardworking, fun-loving and independent. If you don’t think you’re a redneck, you think they’re loud, obnoxious, bigoted and shallow.” Added to the article was a pop quiz featuring questions about NASCAR, food, and TV’s Hee Haw, as if by a simple computation right answers could distinguish the “real Bubbas from the wanna-bes.” 3

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

  I returned a few weeks later with my boyfriend and a photographer I hired to assist in the self-portraiture. She shot on medium format film and had experience photographing beautiful smut. The rooms were perfectly sun-dappled. I posed in various positions on the bed, on a chair, in a windowsill. I sat on the dirty mantle in front of the blue neon skyline in the New York room. The light faded, and we moved to capture the shot I really wanted: the money shot, the facial. The moment of ejaculation has been colloquially renamed the money shot because, historically, porn producers have had to pay more for it. Citing Marcuse and Debord, Linda Williams writes in her book Hard Core, “As the industry’s slang term for the moment the hard-core film ‘delivers the goods’ of sexual pleasure, the money shot seems the perfect embodiment of the illusory and insubstantial ‘one-dimensional’ ‘society of the spectacle’ of advanced capitalism—that is, a society that consumes images even more avidly than it consumes objects.” But I disagree with Williams’s characterization: the money shot is neither illusory nor insubstantial. It is a photo-realistic representation of a moment of ecstasy, which is rather godly. The photographer lit us and stood nearby while I gave my boyfriend head, my own head perched uncomfortably in such a way that it was slightly lolling off the bed, wanting to be in position for the photograph I’d instructed them to capture. He warned me he was going to come, and then he did it, streaming over my face in two perfect lines, spreading outward from my mouth like brooks feeding into a lake. I modeled this photograph after Exaltation, one of Koons’s photographs from Made in Heaven. The photo depicts Cicciolina on her back; it’s a close-up of her face, with the top of her chest and neck visible. A hard, red dick rests on her tongue, with ejaculate dripping down her cheek and chin. She wears cotton-candy-colored eye makeup—blue mascara—and her eyebrows are thick and filled in, auburn-brown in shocking contrast to her bleached hair. On her head is a pearl tiara, and in her ears, costume earrings that look like clip-ons. Her clothing is seafoam. She looks like a princess, and also a little bit like she’s dead. I think the piece is gorgeous; a perfect depiction of woman-as-object. I wanted to recapture it with the whore in the artist position. I wanted to see how that subject positioning might change, or not change, someone’s perception of a work that was otherwise formally and compositionally the same. I was both subject and (directorial) photographer. It was my shot to solicit, and to, in several different senses, take.

• From Action (2014)

  To make it easier in my conversations and writing, “queer” is vague enough to wrap me up loosely, like a one-size-fits-all floral caftan (told you I was all about that Love Boat lifestyle). For the most part, I say, “I sleep with people of all genders.” It does not make me feel like I’m obscuring my heart’s actual shape with a free ’n’ breezy muumuu-word. It does not put off someone who was trying to put it on me. “Queer” may not be “cruiser,” but it is sufficient. And succinct enough to preserve the amount of time I would have taken explaining all of this in person, freeing me to spend it starfucking instead. While being a dilettante in terms of what gender your partners are doesn’t have to dictate the way you identify—you can be a heterosexual man, make out with a guy, and have the first part of that status remain firmly true—I don’t really care about any of it. I cruise forth. Oh, please leave me aside, I want to be a… I want to be… I want to live in… There’s more than you can hope for in this world. Alone in the Bone Zone [image file=image_204.jpg] Feeling sexy mostly has to do with YOU YOURSELF—with your inner foundation, regardless of whether another person’s opinion of/attraction to that self sweeps through it. According to Dr. David Schnarch’s book Intimacy and Desire: “A person’s relationship to their self-worth likely informs their relationship to sex more so than lust, romantic love, and attachment. How you see yourself [… ] profoundly shape[s] your sexual desire.” So if you see yourself as an animate slime-filled trash bag, that correlates to the mucked-upness of the sex you’re having (if you’re even having it). Even though I am not always a prime-feeling or -looking person, I try my best to conduct myself majestically, regardless of the times when I’ve been (or at least felt) overworked, poor, lonesome, ugly, anxious, depressed, and so forth. Shove yourself in front of the world, and become near-to-deranged with goodwill and hard work, and I promise: Gilding the kingdom of your brain will help you establish a “sex life” by building, first, a multilayered “life,” no modifiers necessary. Allow yourself to become flooded by your own personality, and make a concerted effort to get rid of the shame that allows you to muffle it for other people’s “comfort.” Most of the time, you’re not comforting anyone by editing yourself; you’re reinforcing that there is one right picture of how to be in the world, and that it likely does not resemble the one that comes to others naturally, too.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  The preceding conversation demonstrates just how much can be done to help someone in a mind control cult in only a few minutes. During that time I was able to quickly establish rapport, collect very valuable information about Gary, and use what I learned to help him take a very important step away from his cult group. If I had used a threatening or condescending tone, I would never have gotten anywhere with Gary. However, because I used a curious, interested tone, Gary was happy to kill some time and chat with a friendly stranger. Once I found out how long Gary had been involved, l was able to quickly determine that he wasn’t enthusiastic about the cult. It was relatively easy for me to get Gary to reminisce about his pre-cult life. When he remembered what he had done before, he was able to reaccess his real identity and get in touch with how he thought, felt and acted before being indoctrinated. He not only remembered his favorite dog, but also talked about how he used to value an independent and adventurous spirit. This was a valuable resource—one he would need to help him walk away from a seven-year commitment to Guru Maharaj Ji. Gary also remembered what he had first thought of the group before becoming involved. He stepped back in time and looked at the group with his pre-cult eyes, thinking that it was a bit weird. Back then he certainly never intended to join the group for life. An important strategy for reality testing is to go back in time and ask, “If you had known then what you know now, would you have made the same decision?” For Gary, apparently the answer would have been no. Then, as I was fishing for more information, Gary stunned me by telling me that Carol, who initially recruited him, had left the group. Since everyone under mind control has been made to be phobic about leaving the group, it didn’t surprise me that Gary didn’t know why she had left. Four years earlier, he was probably not able to consider talking with her. However, it was clear to me that Gary was still curious as to why Carol left the group. He was now at a point in his life where he was more open to this possibility. I gave him a nudge to go talk to Carol. My Own Experience of a Mini-interaction When I first got out of the Moonies, I searched my memory for times when I had questions or doubts about the organization. I remembered several times when I was momentarily thinking outside the Moonie framework. Even though these experiences weren’t enough to get me to leave, they proved significant when I was being deprogrammed.

• From Escape (2007)

  My grandmother Jenny was one of the buffers between us and our mother’s volatility. I learned early on as a child to be a barometer for my mother’s mood swings. Her moods could change hour to hour; I always had to pay attention to which frame of mind she was in and adapt accordingly. But Grandma gave Mother some breathing room, especially when the smaller children were driving her crazy. Whatever my mother’s mental issues were, she was overall a much better mother than many of the women in the community. Grandma came over almost every day and helped care for us. If she got to our house early enough in the morning, there would be no spankings. My grandmother was in her mid-sixties. I think she always seemed so much older to me because she was in very poor health. Women age rapidly in the FLDS. Most have hard lives and often a dozen or more children. Women look okay in their thirties and then age dramatically in their forties. My mother was the youngest of Grandma’s ten children and was born late in Grandma’s life, so my grandmother was very, very old when I knew her. She was heavyset, wrinkled, and worn. Her hair was gray and her eyes were bad, but her spirit was strong and she could tell a story like no one else. I remember sitting in her lap for hours as she told me stories about the Old West and the southern states before the Civil War. Grandma’s husband had died when my mother was two years old. My grandmother—who came from polygamist bloodlines—then was married to an apostle in the FLDS and became part of a plural marriage for the first time. My grandmother believed plural marriage was the most sacred aspect of our faith and told me story after story about how the Mormon Church had been the church of God until it abandoned polygamy. She told me with great pride that her great-grandfather, Benjamin F. Johnson, was one of the first men whom the prophet Joseph Smith introduced to the holy principle of celestial marriage in the nineteenth century. (Smith was rumored to have had between thirty-three and forty-eight wives himself. It’s been said that his youngest wife was fourteen when they married.) The principle of celestial marriage is what defines the FLDS faith. A man must have multiple wives if he expects to do well in heaven, where he can eventually become a god and wind up with his own planet.

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

  I showed a series of these three photos at a gallery in Brooklyn, all capturing the extended moment of my boyfriend ejaculating onto my face. I called the series Exalted, changing the noun to an adjective. I did this because I don’t think the facial creates a state of being, so much as it adorns one, comments on one. The face, waiting for the come shot, is already exalted—purely beautiful, waiting to be desecrated. The woman doesn’t need a face of spilled milk to become more object than woman, holier than thou—she simply needs to be anticipating the moment, ready for it. A woman came to the gallery, a lesbian who told me her marriage had been sexless for twelve years, her wife frigid. She spoke to me about intimate details of her life for forty-five minutes, divulging more than I could have even thought to ask, before turning abruptly to the photographs on the wall, remarking, “These don’t look like you.” I was taken aback; to me, they do. She asked if they were accurate to how I imagine myself looking when I work, and I said they were: like a painting; like a fallen angel; like a pre-Raphaelite drowned girl-child. My friend asked me to read at the launch of their new magazine; I agreed, saying I would decide the content day-of. That morning, I texted them, “I think I’m gonna read something about how I look really beautiful when I give head.” When you give head, your face shines. It shines with your own spit, and your eyes shine, tearing up while you choke. In 2000, Taschen published Natacha Merritt’s Digital Diaries, comprised of Merritt’s pornographic photos of herself and her real-life lovers having sex, masturbating, and tying one another up. In interviews at the time, twenty-two-year-old Merritt embraced her critics, refusing to even call herself an artist, saying, “Am I a narcissist? Absolutely. It’s all about me, me, me. Why is it bad to love yourself? Who taught us that?” Reviewing her work for Salon, David Bowman wrote, Merritt’s blow job pictures are the most memorable images in the book because, I believe, it’s unprecedented for a woman to take self-portraits depicting herself as a cock-sucker … there is one photograph in particular (on Page 66) that is haunting somehow. Most of Merritt’s face is in the frame, as well as the member that is halfway up her yap … In the photo, Merritt is looking up and a bit to the right, concentrating on something. After I talked with her, I knew what she was looking at.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” she said. “You’re a good listener. And that’s all you have to do; just be there to listen. If he doesn’t confide in you, that’s fine, but stay around to keep your eyes and ears open. There’s just one more thing you must promise me.” Another promise. “What?” “That you won’t fall for Rupert even if he makes a pass at you.” “Anaïs! I would never do that!” “Yes, but Rupert can be irresistible.” “I promise you.” I looked into her eyes so she could see my sincerity. “I could never do that to another woman.” “Why not?” “My father, before he left for Mexico, had an affair with my mother’s best friend. I know the pain it caused my mother.” Anaïs nodded, her delicate features taking on her expression of infinite compassion. I added to reassure her, “Besides, Rupert isn’t my type.” [image file=image_rsrc3R3.jpg] Rupert’s fellow musicians all arrived on the dot at six o’clock. Anaïs greeted them warmly and introduced me to each, dropping a tidbit that would provide a topic for conversation after she was gone. In no time the instruments and players were in place, forming a semicircle beside the piano. Anaïs and I sat on the scratchy brown couch, off to the side of the musician’s circle. As they tuned their instruments, she picked up the leather journal resting in her lap and her gold-and-black Montblanc and began to write, completely blocking everyone out, including me, as if she had stepped behind a shower curtain and could hear only rushing water. I resolved to bring my diary the next time to write in as she was doing, so I wouldn’t have to just sit there and listen, and so I could record any gossip before I forgot it. Rupert stood and gave a lecture for my benefit about what they were going to play and how they had adapted the score for their instruments and limited abilities. I imagined he must be a good teacher, though his discourse on the Brahms concerto seemed at odds with his Venice Beach tan, white teeth, and toned physique. I found myself imagining Anaïs’s robust sex life with him. When I glanced back at her, she seemed annoyed for being pulled from her diary writing by Rupert’s theatrical emphasis on certain words and phrases: “The second piano concerto, called The Holy Terror!” She capped her pen with a snap. “Tristine is not one of your students, Rupert! Just play.”