Sadness

Passages

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

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• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  disguised their faces with vizors, like unto spectres, they departed, and yet for all the great sleep that came upon me, I could in no wise leave eating, and whereas, when I wasa man, I could be contented with one or two loaves at the most, now my guts were so greedy that three panniers full would scarcely serve me ; and while I laboured at this business, the morning came, and being moved by even an ass's shamefastness, I left my food at last (though well I liked it) and at a stream hard by I quenched my thirst. And suddenly after, the thieves returned home careful and heavy, bringing no burdens with them, no not so much as one poor cloke, but with all their swords and strength, yea even with the might of their whole band, only a maiden that seemed by her habit to be some gentlewoman born, 4nd the daughter of some noble of that country, who was so fair and beautiful, that though I were an ass, yet I swear that I had a great affection to her. The virgin lamented and tore her hair, and spoiled her garments for the great sorrow she was in, but the thieves brought her within the cave, and essayed to comfort her in this sort: * Weep not, fair gentle- woman, we pray you, for be you assured that we will do no outrage or violence to your person, but take patience awhile for our profit; for necessity and poor estate hath compelled us to this enterprise : we warrant you that your parents (although they be covetous) from their great store will be contented to give us money enough to redeem and ransc« you, that are their own blood, from our hands." With such flattering words they endeavoured to appease the gentlewoman : howbeit she would in no case be comforted, but put her head between her knees and cried piteously. Then they called the old 179 25 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  His father’s tall and solid. He watches Milton over his glasses and that long straight nose of his. “Sir?” Milton asks. Nolan kicks a pinecone from foot to foot at the end of the driveway. Milton waits for his father to say what he needs to say. “Having a good one?” “Yes, Pop,” Milton says. “I am.” “Get back safe.” “Yes, Pop.” “Milton.” “Yep?” Milton puts his forehead to the white grain of the door. Nolan’s on his phone in the yard. His father twists a white towel around the inside of a glass bowl, though it must certainly be dry by now. The opening music of Wheel of Fortune enters the living room, and the glow from the television illuminates the side of his mother’s face. Her pale brown eyes are on him, too. He thinks for a moment that they’re going to stop him. It’s his birthday. Let me have this one thing , he thinks. This one thing. Before it’s all gone. His eyes sting a little. “Have fun.” “Thanks, Pop,” Milton says, and he gently taps the door with his fist. His mother smiles at him and turns to the television. His father goes back through the kitchen doorway. Milton shuts the door behind him, lets it click firmly, and steps out into the cold. • • • It’s the very beginning of November, and the early-evening sky is the color of crushed lilacs. A thick forest of pine trees encircles their subdivision, and beyond that, in the distance, is the shadow of the mountain, one of those low hills at the cusp of Appalachia in northern Alabama. Standing in his driveway, Milton cranes his neck back and stares out over the top of his house and the next and the next, all the way into the city that has been built into this mountain, its lights like a string of pearls. Wood smoke crests on the air. He’s trying to fix the image of the mountain in his mind, because soon he’ll be halfway across the country, shoved down into a valley. After winter break, Milton’s parents are sending him to what they are calling an “enrichment program.” For the entire spring, he’s going to be on a small farm in Idaho, trying to make something of himself. No phone. No internet. Nothing but the hard slopes of the hills and what he imagines to be the vast plain of the sky, studded with stars, streaked with clouds. They have been disappointed with the shape his life has taken, and this is their last attempt, they say, their last big effort. Milton doesn’t know what they want from him. He’s seventeen today, and he feels that he should have more control over his life than he has. Nolan’s got it easy by comparison—his parents give him whatever he wants.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  He wants to learn.” Together my mother and I drive downtown to a museum. On the way we dial in a classical music station. We try to guess the composer; she votes for Haydn, I for Mozart. Neither of us is right—it’s early Beethoven. She asks me to read to her. “You know I learn best auditorily,” she mentions. The book she has brought along is something uplifting, inspirational. At every insight or poetically phrased generalization, my mother and I exclaim, “Isn’t that wonderful!” “I’d like to memorize that.” “Turn down the page, we’ll come back to that.” “Where does an author find such beautiful phrases?” By the time we reach the museum we’re both glowing with wisdom and a lofty love of culture and humanity. I’ve forgotten that I smell bad. In fact, by now I smell wonderful, I’m a paschal lamb, but one rendered in cake and icing. We stand in front of a gloomy masterpiece of the Spanish Renaissance, a Christ whose wounds are shockingly deep and black and whose skin is livid; Christ seems less a god and more an addict tossed here, in the public morgue, after a fatal overdose, the puncture marks still open but no longer bleeding. My mother trembles. “I don’t like depressing things,” she confides, and hurries us to the French Impressionists. Outside, in the feeble winter sunlight, she grabs my hand and says, “I feel you’re such a perfect companion. When I’m with you I feel such total spiritual union that I sometimes forget I’m with you. I think we’re two halves of the same soul, don’t you?” I look her deep in the eyes and tell her, “Yes. I’ve never felt so close to anyone.” My calm was restored—but the calm was sepulchral. When a psychologist gave me the ink-blot test, I saw no people in the abstract shapes, only cemeteries, diamonds and ballrooms. I thought I was Jupiter or his disguised and only seemingly powerless incarnation. We lived one year in a suburb so new it was still being built in fields of red clay: a neat grid of streets named after songbirds was being dropped like a lattice of dough over a pie. Up and down Robin and Tanager and Bluebird I raced my bike; in a storm I pedaled so fast I hoped to catch up with the wind-driven rain. As I sped into the riddling wet warmth I shook my right hand according to a magical formula of my own. The universe, signaled by its master, groaned, revolved, released a flash of lightning. At last the imagination, like a mold on an orange, was covering the globe of my mind. In the sand I built castles that took on a splendor only the sea could fathom. In the winter I re-created my royal residences and processions in the snow.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  The girl sneezes. The sound is scraping and rough in the bathroom. Sylvia tucks her hands under the girl’s armpits and lifts her out. “All clean,” she says. She wraps the girl in a towel and leads her down the hall to her bedroom. Leaving her there, Sylvia returns to the bathroom and lets the water out of the tub. She runs some water to rinse the soap down the drain. Bugs twitch on the bottom of the tub, and Sylvia picks them out one by one, along with the twigs and the pieces of leaves that have not been washed away. She flushes the black things down the toilet and goes downstairs to clean the living room. The parents will be back soon. In just a couple of hours. And then she’ll slip from this house to the next like a ghost, like a phantom in the middle of the day. As she cleans, she hears the girl upstairs, thumping around. MEAT They were lying in lionel’s bed again, facing each other. “Where are you from?” Lionel asked, and then, because the question seemed too personal, even though they had just fucked, he said, “Not that you have to tell me.” “Bangor,” Charles said. “Maine.” “What’s it like there?” “Cold. Wet. Empty,” he said. “It’s kind of a bleak place.” “That seems dramatic.” Charles didn’t say anything after that, and Lionel was afraid that he had been too sharp. He put his hand on Charles’s chest and moved closer to him beneath the blanket. The bed’s complaint under his shifting weight drew his attention to the fact that he was yet again sharing this lumpy mattress with another person. So remarkable was the thought that he could not hold it still, and it slipped down out of his awareness. It was just as well. “Sorry,” Lionel said. “What are you sorry for?” “You got quiet.” “If I’m quiet, I’m quiet.” “Okay,” Lionel said, “sorry for being sorry.” Charles flicked the bruise on Lionel’s cheek with the same casual gesture he’d used to spin his fork around last night. Lionel could still feel the indentations of Charles’s teeth. The skin was swollen and a little tender from the hickey. But it was nothing, really. By morning it would be gone. It seemed sad that it would fade or that things had to end. When he was a child, that had depressed him. When his mother read him stories, he’d bawl at the end even if the little duck found its way back to its mother or the bears and the girl became friends or green eggs and ham were eaten. It didn’t matter if the story had a happy ending or if things turned out okay and all the scary things were put away. He hated that vertiginous feeling of things ending. That sense of the world dropping off under his feet.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Still young, many too young; boys and youngmen more knowledgeable now— because youth is no guarantee of innocence (as bands of preteenagers increasingly preying violently on the lame old attest), just as age is no affirmation of corruption. Mutual exploitation—the old corrupt, the young corrupt. That is the nature of the ugly, devouring, beautiful, lonely, exciting, devastating, dead-end, glorious hustling streets. No, you don't get rich on the streets—though you have good periods and at first it seems you might. True, a few hustlers will find one person who genuinely cares for them, even helps them into another life. But that's rare on the streets. Other hustlers will drop out, when the intervals of waiting stretch into nights—get jobs, marry, have children, perhaps even be relatively happy, more than likely eke out lives of screaming frustration. Others may move into the vaster gay world of non-commercial encounters, even form relationships. Some are only summer hustlers, returning “home” when the season is over. But the resourceless ones-yes, most of them—what happens when they're through on the exciting, tough streets, those once-goodlooking, once-youngmen cocky in their desirability, remembering the cars that braked eagerly, the often-beautiful homes their looks opened so easily? They disappear. And on skid row—if you care to look—you may now and then see among the others a singularly doomed old man. Something makes you look again. Lurking in the weather-scorched brown face is the lingering breath of a special magic, the thin, sad ghost of the conquering youngman he was. 6:56 P.M. Griffith Park The Twilit Road. J IM RETURNS URGENTLY to Griffith Park. He drives up the road, but the upper paths have begun to thin. For twilit moments the blatant exhibitionists will flourish. Shadows have spread a mantle over the green. The exodus of cars moves downward to join the pageant of sex at the bottom of the park. Driving back, Jim pauses at a sandy crest overlooking the city. He stands there. Below, smog smothers the streets. Palmtrees stretch their full length to the sky. 7:14 P.M. Griffith Park. The Lower Areas. Daily, the areas of the sexhunt are reduced mainly to two—the upper ones virtually eliminated as night begins to float in, shadows tangling first at the top of the road. At the bottom, dozens of cars gather along the periphery of the park, still light with hot sun. Hunters move on foot into the forested brush nearby, knowing each hollow, each path. Throughout the area, lone figures stand—just stand—waiting, dots in the green sea. Several men move slowly along the paths paralleling the main road, only their lower bodies visible, upper bodies hidden by branches. Soon twilight will hover over the park. For moments everything will be luminous. Shafts of brilliant dying light will pierce the freezing green.

• From Escape (2007)

  I began to see that we’d made it out just in time. But I was sickened by what I heard about people who had been part of my life. When Faunita was eventually released from the mental institution in Flagstaff, she hitched a ride from someone and returned to Colorado City and stood alone on the doorstep of our old home. She tried to open the door, but it was locked. When Merril moved to Texas, he gave the house to Nathan, Faunita’s son. But since Faunita had been excommunicated, Nathan’s family wouldn’t let her in. Faunita stood in the rain while her grandchildren stared out the windows at her. Ruth and Merril’s son Wallace finally came and picked her up. Wallace told her she couldn’t stay in the community, drove her to a motel in Hurricane, and left her there. In the end, one of Faunita’s grandsons, Merril III, who had been kicked out of the FLDS and was a “lost boy,” came and rescued her. He rented her a little place and bought her groceries. But he was a teenager trying to survive on construction jobs and not making very much. With little education, he could barely survive himself. Faunita was also a diabetic, so her health was perilous. One day she was found wandering, delirious, in Wal-Mart. After forty years of living with Merril’s abuse, Faunita was badly damaged and very sick. A few women who had been on the other side of the religious split that divided the FLDS started helping her buy groceries. Her situation was particularly heartbreaking to me. But a year later, quite unexpectedly, Faunita, her daughter, Audrey, and son-in-law, Merlin, dropped in to see me. I was as delighted as I was stunned. I never expected that anyone from Merril’s family would want to see me again. Faunita looked happier than I had ever seen her. She hugged me and laughed joyfully. She said she wanted to apologize for not helping me more when Harrison was so sick. Faunita was close to tears when she told me how sad she felt for me then. But she said she was too sick herself to reach out to me. I never expected Faunita to make such a turnaround. Even though she is alone much of the time now, she is removed from the constant cruelty and abuse she endured for decades as one of Merril’s wives. Brian moved back to Utah in the spring of 2005. He wanted to be closer to his two teenage boys, and to me. One of the things I love about Brian is that he is a devoted father. His sons anchor his life.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  But then he was ready to stand on his own, or else he didn’t want her to think that he couldn’t. She put her arm around his waist to steady him and they went into the hall, where they could already hear the music starting up again. How long had it been since he’d spoken to Sophie? Alek sat on the floor now and began to stretch. First his legs. Then his back. He stretched to the tips of his toes, pressing himself flush against the tops of his thighs, holding the position for as long as he could. He could feel the cough gathering along the edge of his lungs, that tickling heat. He suppressed it as best he could. He counted to twenty and released the stretch, then lay on his back. The cough came quickly, loudly, and filled the empty room in the way a lonely prayer might fill a cathedral. The last time that he’d spoken to Sophie was at the end of the summer. They were sleeping in his bed, her body tight to his. The fan drew the heavy air through the window, animated it slightly, and cooled their skin. They slept naked on top of his thin sheet. Sophie’s hair writhed in the fan’s breeze, and he lay there, watching her sleep. He had sensed a distancing between them for a couple of weeks, ever since they had seen Charles at the bonfire that night after the concert in the park. Sophie left Alek’s lap to speak to Charles, and he had been forced to watch it all unfurl. Charles, thick, as if cut from the side of a mountain. Charles with his decent but unremarkable technique. Charles with his curls and handsome face—he and Sophie had gone around together for as long as Alek had known them both, but Sophie had surprised him by letting him kiss her the night after the cough began. Sophie had let him put his hand on her lower back and draw her to him, had let him feel so much bigger for it, in control of both of their bodies. It was like partnering, how one only appears to surrender to the illusion of grace. And then he’d thought, perhaps, that she liked him enough, that he was enough for her. That she and Charles were done. They made small dinners. They spoke together in low voices outside the practice hall. They held hands in the casual, easy way that comes to people in relationships. Alek had begun to imagine a lifetime of such minor joys, small intimacies, which were all he could manage. They would be dancers and in love. But when she left him by the fire to stand next to Charles, he had known that the thing between them, for all its easiness and the joy it brought him, would end. And so for weeks he had watched her recede.

• From Escape (2007)

  Merril said it was odd. He told them he never understood why some wives had personalities that were totally in sync with their husband’s while others did not. He’d talked to Uncle Rulon about this. The aging prophet had said that some wives worked hard to be a blessing to their husbands but were little more than workhorses. According to Merril, Uncle Rulon said that this is heartache for them on earth but after they die, the hurt they have suffered is instantly healed because the Lord gives their husbands an appreciation for them in death that he never had for them in life. Cathleen heard this as glorious news. When she told it to me the next day I said I thought it was preposterous. How could any woman endure a life of misery with such a cheap promise of appreciation after her death? But Cathleen dutifully returned to Page to work she hated and that also kept her away from the children she loved. One night I heard her oldest daughter crying. I went upstairs to the dining room and saw a child sobbing on the floor in a heap. My eight-year-old daughter, LuAnne, came running over to me with big angry eyes. “Do you know what happened? Mother Barbara came up to one of Mother Cathleen’s girls and started hitting her on the head with Barbie’s extra-big crochet hook.” I grabbed LuAnne and got her away from there. If anyone heard her reporting on Barbara she’d be in danger. Merril walked into the dining room and over to the crying child. He clapped his hands. “Stop this nonsense!” Having seen her shuddering and crying on the floor a few hours before made me realize that even though I could protect my children somewhat from Merril’s abuse by having sex with him, I was helpless to keep them from witnessing the abuse of their other siblings. I was also sickened by my inability to protect the other children. I made sure my children slept in my bedroom again. No one would be able to come into my bedroom and touch them without waking me up. I was so upset I called Cathleen at Page that night and told her everything I had seen and heard. “Cathleen, you may get a reward from Merril in your next life, but what about the abuse your children are getting in this life?” The conversation stopped. Cathleen was silent for a long time and then said goodbye. I knew she was terribly upset. But she didn’t know what to do to protect her children. Harrison’s Cancer I remember walking to the store on a chilly day in early spring when I saw a slow line of cars pulling away from the cemetery. A four-month-old baby had just been buried. I knew his mother. This was her second son, and one who had been born apparently healthy.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Their legs touch lightly. Now both are slightly embarrassed. Too much was given, which neither has given before to that degree. But: “My name is Steve; yours?” the youngman asks. “John,” Jim says. Neither can bring himself to ask what they both want-to spend the night together. Tentatively, slowly, the youngman begins to dress, sits back, resumes dressing. Trying to sound casual, he says: “Hey, I'll give you my phone number.” Jim says quickly: “I'll give you mine too.” They exchange phone numbers—knowing unequivocally, as well as they know their outlaw world, that despite the intense moments—afraid of rejection—neither will ever call the other. That this is all. “Bye.” “Bye.” Sunday 7:34 A.M. The Apartment H E WOKE AND LOOKED toward the windows. Dawn has evaporated. He moved from night to morning avoiding the purple limbo. This memory lodges in his mind: the man at Greenstone turning from him fiercely, spitting angrily. Jim's mind rushes to drown the memory: the muscular man in the park, the long, beautiful orgasm; the fact that he was paid to be desired (but remembers: the bronzed baby shoes, the aged photograph of the woman; Roo). Danny—that memory obtrudes…. The youngman named John … and Steve; the many, many others who admired him, desired him; and those he desired back…. Yet: The memory persists of the strange man at Greenstone—and the eternal vacuum during which nothing happened. Suddenly he wishes he had got up earlier and joined the first wave of post-dawn hunters in Griffith Park. FLASHBACK: Griffith Park An Early Sunday Morning. Those still up after the purple stasis in the broken cycle of sex must push the search forcedly into the next day. The gates into Griffith Park open early, when foggy mist still clings in shreds. Jim drove up the hill for the intense moments. Within the lingering mist, flagrant exhibitionists stood openly naked by their cars. Other outlaws walked silently along the rustling brush. That morning—and the world was ice-green—Jim stood shirtless halfway up the road and by his car. A van drove up. The side door slid open, the driver unseen. Jim walked past the door. A goodlooking man lay on the floor naked. His own narcissistic exhibitionism, not nearly as blatant, is affronted by the other's. Jim would have walked away, but the man called out to him. Inside, he took Jim's clothes off. The door left open, they made sex for long minutes. Moments later, on a rocky trail in the barely clinging haze, Jim leaned against a tree. Two men took turns blowing him. Hostile only in those misty moments, the bright sun stared into his sleepless eyes. When Jim emerged out of the trail, the sun shone in splendor, preparing for the afternoon shift of hunters. 11:07 A.M. The Apartment. Lying in his bedroom, Jim knew that the early moments in the park had vanished for today. He fell asleep again— and didn't wake till near noon. He showers in cold, cold water.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Marta clenched, both from the news that Peter’s mother was ill and from the fact that he missed her. Peter’s mother, Irina, had always been so kind to Marta. She was well into her eighties, but she had the spry energy of a seventy-year-old. She spoke with a sluggish Russian accent, and liked to finish off her sentences with a khorosho!, which had endeared her to Marta. All through the three years she had dated Peter, Irina had sent her cards for her birthday and Christmas. More than once she’d sent her a little gift, too, something small and delicate, intricately carved from bone or stone so that they resembled small teeth. She had reminded Marta of her own grandmother, a benevolent Finnish woman of robust health who had fallen dead at the age of ninety-nine with all the unfussy ease that had seen her through her whole life, through famine and fury and the unassailable tide of history. “Oh, no. I’m sorry, Peter,” Marta said. “That’s awful, just awful.” “She really loves you, you know. She thinks the world of you.” “I care for her, too,” Marta said. “And for me?” Peter said wryly, but perhaps also seriously. Marta shook her head gently. “Peter, you know that’s done. You know that, right?” “I do,” he said. “I’m seeing someone.” “And even if you weren’t,” she started to say, but stopped herself. “That’s wonderful.” “Her name’s Katya. You know my mom always wanted me to marry a Russian.” “I’m sure she just wants you to be happy,” Marta said. “I bet she only wants you to be happy.” “I am. Now I am. I am happy now.” “I’m glad to hear that,” Marta said. “And you? Are you happy? Are you seeing someone?” If there was one thing that Marta resented, it was how those questions seemed to flow together: Are you happy or are you alone? “It’s possible to be happy and alone,” she said to Peter and to herself, to the voice inside her. “I get that, but you should have someone. You deserve happiness.” Marta turned to him and nodded. “Thank you, Peter.” The leaves had turned bright orange and gold. All along her street, the trees were beautiful, which meant that they were getting ready to shed their leaves. She wanted to say something about that to Peter, about Irina and how the trees grew more beautiful just as they seemed to die for the season, and how that was a sign of life. Only living things got to die, after all. She had not understood that before, but now she did, and she wanted to say some of it to Peter, hoping he’d say it to Irina. That dying meant you had lived. “Well, I better go,” he said. “All right,” Marta said. Peter did not move to get out of the car.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Enid grows redder the more they haggle over her soul. Grace reaches for an orange slice, pulls the white pith from it, and makes a small pile on the table. She sometimes is struck by the irony of this new arrangement, staying with Big Davis after treatments, waiting for her mother. Somehow, at the age of twenty-five, she’s reverted to her childhood self, the one who waited after school at her grandparents’ house until her parents came for her. Often they were so late that the sun was going down by the time they arrived, their eyes red, faces tight and hot. She had been relieved to get away from all that once she and her brother got old enough to look after themselves, but neither ever forgot those long, hot hours in their grandmother’s kitchen, the endless days of waiting to be retrieved, wondering if they’d get to go home or if they’d have to stay. But Enid has been better these last ten years. She is not who she once was, though that version of herself remains in this kitchen, as if conjured up out of their collective memory, as if in this family one is powerless to resist its curious gravity. Grace feels a small flicker of pleasure at watching Enid shift uncomfortably. “Let’s just stay,” Grace says to her mother, “it’s easier.” Enid’s expression is one of betrayal, but it passes. Grace puts the orange in her mouth and sucks the juice from it, as if in penance. It stings and slides down the back of her throat, alleviates some of the dryness but leaves only a sense of unslaked thirst. “We’ll stay, then, if it’s no trouble.” “Good,” he says. “I’ll help,” Enid says. “What do you need?” He hands her a bouquet of turnip greens, bits of dirt dropping to the floor. They are still warm from the garden. “You handle that,” he says. “I got this going.” The rain grows heavy, dropping into the windowsill behind her back, splattering her in fragments of cool. “What’s for dinner?” Grace asks, and they are elated. A sign of appetite, of hunger. “Turnips and some of this roast I made last night and some corn bread,” Big Davis says, and he’s proud of it. Enid is the one cutting up the greens and the turnip roots, which have always been Grace’s favorite. Her brother hates greens of all varieties, and he especially hates turnips. He says they’re too bitter, and Grace always has to remind him that he’s thinking of mustard greens, not turnips. But Davis hates to be corrected more than he hates greens, so he does not hear her, which usually results in a protracted silence over the phone. The kitchen is muggy with steam. She wishes she could get up and go outside, sit on the porch swing to watch the storm roll in. But she would have to ask someone, and they’d look at her with worry and pity.

• From Escape (2007)

  “He slept with me all night and didn’t kiss me once, not even this morning. You walk through the door and he’s grabbing you and kissing you the minute he gets his hands on you.” Tammy was so distraught and her pain so real, but I didn’t know what to say. Tammy had humiliated Merril to his family and children. Her future was the price Merril would make her pay. I told Tammy I was sorry and wished there was more I could do. But we both knew there wasn’t. Tammy stopped talking to Merril, but did not give up on trying to win him back. She waited on him hand and foot and, once again, began following Barbara around. I think she thought if she could win Barbara back as an ally, she might urge Merril to have sex with her again. But nothing changed. Merril and Barbara knew she was now an example of what could happen to someone who challenged their authority. Tammy was refuse—another body added to the scrap heap along with Faunita and Ruth. Several years later, Tammy went to Merril and told him she could no longer live without physical affection. How could he expect her to live that way forever? Merril was reading while she talked. He turned to her when she was finished, took off his reading glasses, looked across his desk, and said, “I always knew you had a weak character!” Tammy stood up and walked out of Merril’s office. As far as I know, this was the last time this matter was ever discussed. Resound of Music My sister Linda had moved back into the FLDS community with her husband because they were broke. She was pregnant with her second baby and didn’t have a lot of options. Linda also missed her family terribly. Linda was having a hard time in her marriage, which made her precarious life even harder. My father said he would help her financially, but there were strings attached. Linda had to agree to leave her husband, since he had refused to swing to our side of the religious split. She also had to agree to be reassigned in marriage by the prophet to another man. Linda had no other cards to play, so she agreed. She was assigned to marry a man with three children. Linda was told that if she kept herself in harmony with her new husband, then her life would be perfect in every way and God would bless her with everything she needed.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Roo closes the bedroom door behind him. Jim hears excited talk: A rough voice: “Listen to me, Roo, I need twenty bucks right away. Now, dammit, I need it bad, and I'm in a hurry, Roo!” Roo's voice is deliberately controlled—but tinged with agitation, and fear: “No, no! I don't have any money. And I have someone with me,” he warns. “Dammit, Roo!” The voice gets rougher. “I said no!” “You wanna blow me? I got a few minutes; you wanna blow me for the twenty bucks?” “I told you, I'm with someone— …” “Roo—… Motherfucker— …” “All right. I'll give you a check. They'll cash it at that corner store.” “And give me some cigarettes, I'm outta cigarettes.” “All right, all right—just go away. Please!” A few seconds later: “Here.” The door slams. Flushed, Roo returns to Jim in the bedroom. “You're gorgeous,” Roo resumes, his breathing slightly uneven. He kneels before Jim. “Shut your eyes, don't look at me.” Jim closes his eyes. He feels Roo's suddenly toothless mouth on his cock. Jim didn't come. Roo came secretly, trying to disguise even his quickened breathing. Jim goes to the shower, the water harsh and cold on his body. Through, he stands wrapped in a towel; stands by the living room door looking at Roo's skinny form at the piano. Now Jim sees the photograph—a faded picture of an old white-haired woman—and the bronzed object—bronzed baby shoes tarnished with age. The tiny, shriveled, used form of Roo sits at the piano and sings—beautifully—an old romantic song. VOICE OVER: Hustlers, Clients, and Eminent Psychiatrists VOICE OVER: Hustlers, Clients, and Eminent Psychiatrists “M ALEHUSTLERS .… D RIFTERS , tough, street-smart. And smarter, but pretending, sometimes, to be dumb. Students and middle-class youngmen, though on the rough streets not as many as, briefly too, become callboys (the callboy faction being safer, more ‘conservative’—only muted revolution there). A precarious existence—you're new one day, old another. The clients remain, the sellers are pushed aside; a fresh wave of hustling outlaws flows regularly into the city. “The customers.… The myth says they're all middle-aged or older, probably married, shy. But that's not true. Those exist, yes, abundantly; there are, too—though far, far fewer—the attractive and the young who merely prefer to pay, especially among those who want to cling to the myth that masculine hustlers are ‘straight.’” I'm speaking about male streethustling to a group of eminent California psychiatrists and psychologists who meet irregularly. I sit at one end of the table and face about twenty men and women. Occasionally they will whisper briefly among each other.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  My mother’s interest in plans and arrangements coexisted with the most peculiar notion of what those arrangements should consist of—and a wild caprice that could overturn everything she’d worked out so methodically. Naïve and proud at the time of her divorce, she wanted to conserve money but also maintain a good address. She decided the three of us should live in that expensive hotel in one furnished room with twin beds, my sister and I taking turns sleeping on the floor. For the first time in her life our mother had a job, one at which she worked long hours. At night she was going out on dates or haunting nightclubs downtown. Because she was seldom at home I ate most of my suppers alone in the hotel dining room; my sister ate at a different hour in order to avoid my company. Before her divorce my mother had never so much as written a check. Now our fortunes teetered and careened and ground to a halt. She bought a knee-length mink but economized on food, bought a flashy Lincoln convertible but refused to send my sister to the orthodontist, packed us off to expensive summer camps but on the bus, not the train. She drank heavily and played sentimental records in the evening on the few nights she stayed home; one winter the record of “Now Is the Hour” became so worn the spindle hole grew as big as a dime, but still the voice yearned on and on. Another winter the voice, wobbling sickeningly, sang “The Tennessee Waltz.” When Mother was discouraged a smell of physical self-hatred would come off her body; she groaned her way through her self-hatred as though it were a mountain of laundry she had to wash, a dirty, physical, humiliating task. Then something nice would happen. Someone would compliment her or a man would take an interest in her—and presto, she was not only equal to other people but superior to them. The terrible laundering would be forgotten. She’d sit up very straight in her chair and smile a sort of First Lady smile. I spent many gala nights, including my eighth, ninth and tenth birthdays, in nightclubs beside my mother. She’d split a simple pasta dish with me to save money and then order highball after highball as we’d look longingly toward the man at the bar. Had he noticed Mother? Would he send her a drink? Or would he be scared off by my presence?

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

  Problems With Intimate Relationships Inside cults, members often have little chance to form a normal, satisfying intimate relationship with a partner. They may be forced into celibacy, paired with someone they would never have chosen on their own, or coerced into a life of sexual servitude. When they leave the group and begin to live in the real world, sooner or later they have to deal with the fact that, for years, their need for a satisfying relationship was never met. Yet the experience of having been taken advantage of, often for years, makes it hard for people to take the emotional risk of forming close relationships with others. Some people have denied their own sexuality for so long that they may have difficulty expressing it. In other cases, ex-members got into sexual relationships with trainers or leaders who manipulated them, with little regard for their feelings. That said, I have met a number of people who married in a cult, raised children, left the cult and managed to navigate their lives together. They are by far the exception. Most relationships break up after exiting the group. Sometimes one person stays in the group, which makes it very difficult when there are young children. Trust in yourself and learning to trust someone else, much less a group, is a really big deal for ex-cult members. Feeling your real feelings and learning how to express them in healthy ways is so important. Learning to respect yourself and your partner as a separate and individual human being is essential. How to problem solve and share power is another essential issue. Some Christian cults put women under the control of men, and it can be difficult to unlearn such subservience. In all of these cases, it’s best to seek therapy with a mental health professional who understands undue influence. Ways To Heal Yourself The most effective emotional support and information will usually come from former cult members who are further along in the healing process. But the actual healing is the responsibility of the former cult member. Finding and becoming part of a healthy group can be a big step forward. It took me a full year, after I left the Moonies, before I gingerly involved myself with a group of any kind—in this case, a peer counseling organization at college, in 1977. In 1986, I served for a year as the national coordinator of a loosely knit group of ex-cult members who wanted to help themselves and others. It wasn’t easy to coordinate a group of people who have all been burned by group involvement! But my experience taught me that such a thing is possible.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  RustyShe decided to go to the party at the last minute when Irene urged her to get out and enjoy herself. Seeing the worry on Miri’s face now, she began to regret her decision. Maybe it had been a mistake to keep the men in her life a secret. Not that there had been many. But she’d never brought a date home. Not one man in fifteen years. She hadn’t done a thing to get Miri used to the idea, to the possibility. In all these years, there had been just two serious boyfriends. One of them had been married. She certainly wasn’t going to introduce him to her family. She knew from the start he would never leave his wife and children. She knew she wasn’t his first affair. Yet she kept seeing him. For five years she saw him every week. If you asked her about him today she wouldn’t be able to explain it. Just that she’d been young and she’d enjoyed the attention, the thrill, the sex. The second man was decent and available. He’d proposed after a few months, with a diamond as big as her thumbnail. For a minute she thought she could learn to love him, could be happy with his promise of a big house in the suburbs, a maid to clean and cook, summer camp for Miri. But when it came time to introduce him to the family she couldn’t do it. They would see right through her. They would see the truth—she didn’t love him, wasn’t the least attracted to him and didn’t want to marry him, not even for an easier life. Sometimes she wondered about her first love, but not often. A girl gets in trouble, she marries the boy. They wind up hating each other, resenting each other and finally they get a divorce. By then it’s taken its toll on both of them and their children. No, she never wanted that, which is why she’d refused to allow her mother to call the Monskys and force Mike to marry her. Maybe she would fall in love again. If and when that happened she would introduce him to Miri. But until then, what was the point? MiriThe Osners’ living room glowed. The Hanukkah bush was gone, replaced by a fire in the fireplace, and, at the baby grand from Altenburgs on East Jersey Street, Dr. O sat on the upholstered bench, covered by a needlepoint canvas hand-stitched by Corinne. His fingers danced over the keys, never hesitating, the same fingers that worked magic in his patients’ mouths. The guests were singing around the piano, glasses of Scotch and rye and bourbon resting on coasters to avoid getting water marks on the polished ebony. If anyone was careless, Mrs. Barnes was there in a flash, slipping a coaster under a glass here, scooping a crumpled cocktail napkin into her pocket to be deposited in the trash in the kitchen, where Mrs.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I mention the constant music because, to my mind at least, it served as an invisible link between my father and me. He never discussed music beyond saying that the German Requiem was “damn nice” or that the violin and cello concerto was “one hell of a piece,” and even these judgments he made with a trace of embarrassment; for him, music was emotion, and he did not believe in discussing feelings. His real love was the late Brahms, the piano Intermezzi and especially the two clarinet sonatas. These pieces, as unpredictable as thought and as human as conversation, filled the house night after night. Here, while marveling at a blocked father’s grunted assessment of his favorite masterpiece as “nice,” the author himself pushes on, calling that same composer’s work, “unpredictable as thought and as human as conversation.” What could better describe the ravishments, the surprise turns of late Brahms? Damn nice phrase, that. And yet, for the speaking child, the withheld human conversation can only be deduced via the music seeking to simulate it. Art stands in here as a lonely substitute for some familial, personal eloquence that really should have preceded it, right? Left alone to itself, Art becomes an onanistic moral agent. Its lessons must be misapplied by however bright a child. He inevitably concocts a world self-serving and amoral, since it is a realm cut off from any deep emotive consequence to others. And so, the father—who explains how men should use only the verb “like,” never “love”—is assassinated by the author’s phrase. It is a figure so apt, sad, opulent, Brahmsian. And yet this very summation seeks to show his “straight” emotionally retarded father how it might be done. This very book is a strange invitation to Dad for A Dad’s Own Story. Which produces only silence. And this attempt to tell it all anyway—as an artful ventriloquist might—by the “thrown” voice of a boy soprano. II White has written fond dimensional biographies of those fellow gay rule-breakers: Proust and Genet. He shows us a Proust impervious to expected store-bought pleasures, susceptible only to surprises, shocks of joy and unforeseen betrayal that overtake him with the force of martyrdom. White also identifies with Genet, the congenital thief whose criminality begat a fictional formalism of such surpassing symmetry, such tuberose-scented beauty, it can elevate any jail cell to an altar. Edmund White’s own prose benefits from the examples of these willingly incarcerated French uncles: sealed in a cork-lined study or a cold stone cellblock, they must each make a great deal of seemingly little. How to find the heroic solace in one’s own self-admitted self-administered condemnation?

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  It’s harder to argue with apathy. Davis texts Grace throughout the week: You seen Big Davis? Tell him he was right about Marshfield being awful Remind him the pond needs to be restocked Tell him about this new rabbit trap Tell him they be shooting out here Tell him something for me Sometimes Grace wants to weep at how pitiful it is. The Tell him something for me is the worst of it. She could read the text message in its entirety. It’s not the words. It’s not the what . Enid knows about the text messages. She has made her feelings known. Which is why he does not call her. Not because of the gay thing—Enid is ambivalent on the point of sexuality. What room would she have to judge, her own life having exploded so spectacularly? No. It’s something else. Judgment. Davis feels judged , he says. Sometimes she act like I’m trying to murder somebody. Just to be asking about Big Davis. She act like she don’t care I don’t exist anymore , is what Davis said the last time they spoke about it. “She’s projecting,” Grace had said. Because years ago, when they were small, Enid had shown up at this house with Grace and Davis squeezed tight to her like a shield bearer wading into a sea of pikemen. Grace’s father had gotten himself stabbed outside a bar in Charlottesville—no surprise, considering, was what the church ladies said. It had never been a secret how Big Davis felt about white people, and here Enid was. The church ladies had words for that, too. Begging. Cut off from her own kind, like she hadn’t known what would happen. Grace wonders if Enid sees in this needling some imitation of how it had been years before, when they were younger, and pushed like little pawns across a chessboard. Sees, perhaps, some reflection of the deceased Junior. “He should be a man,” Enid says. “He’s a man. Big Davis is a man,” Grace replies. “That’s the problem.” “Men and trouble, like water and a grease fire.” “We ain’t,” Big Davis replies as the door bangs shut behind him. Sweat and the scent of earth trail out ahead of him. He bends down and kisses the top of Grace’s forehead. She rubs his back, feels the damp of him through his shirt. His whiskers bristle against her cheek. He’s purple-black with stark white hair, deep blue eyes. “You are,” Enid says. “Big Davis.” “Enid,” he says, taking from the plate almost all of the orange segments. She squints at him. Grace feels a flutter of relief. Leans back in her chair and lets it hold her up. The strain of maintaining her posture has left her feeling a little winded. “I sure thank you for taking Grace in for the appointment today.” “Well, I took her fishing. I took her to school. I took her for ice cream. To the movies.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  She lived. Her hand was even sewn back on, though the incident (jealous lover with an ax) had broken her mind. Afterward the girl didn’t go back to her job and feared even leaving the building. My stepmother thought the loss of blood had somehow left her feeble-minded. In the hospital parking lot my father fussed over the blood on his suit and on the Cadillac upholstery, though I wondered if his pettiness wasn’t merely a way of silencing Blanche, who kept kissing his whole hand in gratitude. Or perhaps he’d found a way of reintroducing the ordinary into a night that had dipped disturbingly below the normal temperature of tedium he worked so hard to maintain. Years later, when Charles died, my father was the only white man to attend the funeral. He wasn’t welcome, but he went anyway and sat in the front row. After Charles’s death my father became more scattered and apprehensive. He would sit up all night with a stopwatch, counting his pulse. That had been another city—Blanche’s two rooms, scrupulously clean in contrast to the squalor of the halls, her parrot squawking under the tea towel draped over the cage, the chromo of a sad Jesus pointing to his exposed, juicy heart as though he were a free-clinic patient with a troubling symptom, the filched wedding photo of my father and stepmother in a nest of crepe-paper flowers, the bloody sheet torn into strips that had been wildly clawed off and hurled onto the flowered congoleum floor. In my naïveté I imagined that all poor people, black and white, liked each other and that here, through Fountain Square, I would feel my way back to the street, that smell of burning honey, that blood as red as mine and that steady, colorless flare in the glass chimney … These hillbillies on the square with their drawling and spitting, their thin arms and big raw hands, nails ragged, tattoos a fresher blue than their eyes set in long sallow faces, each eye a pale blue ringed by nearly invisible lashes—I wove these men freely into the cloth of the powerful poor, a long bolt lost in the dark that I was now pulling through a line of light. I opened a book and pretended to read under the weak streetlamps, though my attention wandered away from sight to sound. “Freddy, bring back a beer!” someone shouted. Some other men laughed. No one I knew kept his nickname beyond twelve, at least not with his contemporaries, but I could hear these guys calling each other Freddy and Bobby, and I found that heartening, as though they wanted to stay, if only among themselves, as chummy as a gang of boys. While they worked to become as brutal as soon enough they would be, I tried to find them softer than they’d ever been.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  Ten months later, it’s my turn to talk. Dad listens, snuggling with me on the couch. I’ve just been laid off, the economy’s so bad I can’t find another job, and my savings won’t last long. My little cat’s sick; she’s got cancer and it’s too far gone to operate. Bob’s been real cranky, we’ve been fighting a lot, and we don’t hardly ever have sex anymore. I’m just glad I have a brawny Dad like Draden to hold me tonight. “I’m done,” I say, tipping the fifth of Jack to my lips. “Sorry you had to hear all that. You know we hillbillies can’t tell a tale of woe any way other than real long.” Dad stands, then pulls me to my feet. He takes the bottle from me, puts it on the table. He crooks a finger under the slave collar I always wear at his place. “I told you I’d take care of you, Donnie,” he says. “Come on.” He leads me down the hall to the playroom. Soon I’m stripped and face up against the St. Andrews cross. Dad locks my wrists and ankles in leather cuffs, so I’m standing spread-eagle. He ball-gags and blindfolds me. He starts slow with a light paddling, the wood warming up my asscheeks. The flogger’s next, heavy strands of leather caressing my shoulders and back. Gradually the blows get more severe. Now it feels like someone’s punching me. I gasp and drool, arch my back and beg for more. “Single-tail now,” Dad says. The whip’s hissing through the air, sharp stinging across my shoulder blades, fire-welts cutting into my back. I pant and shake. Dad moves the action to my ass. The paddle’s no longer a warming glow. The stiff wooden whacks come harder and faster. I bite down on the ball and choke back my cries. I want him to stop now; god, how it hurts, worse than ever before, but I’m his boy and he calls me his little warrior and I want to take it all, want to be brave for him, and now, god, the single-tail again, slicing my shoulders, “You’re bleeding, boy. Want me to stop?” I shake my head, shout out “No!” and oh, fuck, at last, beneath my blindfold I can feel tears trickling, and fuck, oh, fuck, I’m so angry, scared and sad; how it hurts, bound here, bound down in this body; at last something snaps inside me, and the tears are gushing, and I’m sobbing and slobbering, spit’s running down my chin, and I’m shaking and jerking, the chains that hold me down are rattling, and I’m crying and I can’t stop.