Shame

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 A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Unlike my idols I couldn’t play tennis or baseball or swim freestyle. My sports were volleyball and Ping-Pong, my only stroke the sidestroke. I was a sissy. My hands were always in the air. In eighth grade I had appeared in the class pageant. We all wore togas and marched solemnly in to a record of Schubert’s Unfinished. My sister couldn’t wait to tell me I had been the only boy who’d sat not cross-legged on the gym floor but resting on one hand and hip like the White Rock girl. A popular quiz for masculinity in those days asked three questions, all of which I flunked: (1) Look at your nails (a girl extends her fingers, a boy cups his in his upturned palm); (2) Look up (a girl lifts just her eyes, a boy throws back his whole head); (3) Light a match (a girl strikes away from her body, a boy toward—or perhaps the reverse, I can’t recall). But there were less esoteric signs as well. A man crosses his legs by resting an ankle on his knee; a sissy drapes one leg over the other. A man never gushes; men are either silent or loud. I didn’t know how to swear: I always said the final g in fucking and I didn’t know where in the sentence to place the damn or hell. My father was just a bit of a sissy. He crossed his legs the wrong way. He was too fussy about his nails (he had an elaborate manicuring kit). He liked classical music. He was not an easygoing guy. But otherwise he passed muster: he was courageous in a fight; he was a strong, skilled athlete; not many things frightened him; he had towering rages; he knew how to swear; he was tirelessly assertive; and he had a gambler’s good grace about losing money. He could lose lots of it in business and walk away, smiling and shrugging. Kevin was the sort of son who would have pleased my father more than I did. He was captain of his Little League baseball team. On the surface he had good manners, but they were born of training, not timidity. No irony, no superior smirks, no fits of longing or flights of fancy removed him from the present. He hadn’t invented another life; this one seemed good enough. Although he was only twelve, he already throbbed with the pressure to contend, to be noticed, to be right, to win, to make others bend to his will. I found him rather frightening, certainly sexy (the two qualities seemed linked). Because I was three years older, I guessed he expected me to be ahead of him in most ways, and that first night in the boat I was silent in order not to disillusion him. I wanted him to like me.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  As long as I remained unpopular I belonged wholely to my mother. I might fight with her, insult her, sneer at her, ignore her, but I was still hers. She knew that. She even had a way of swaggering around me. There was a coarseness in the speculations she made about me to my face, the way an owner might talk about a horse in its stall. At times she insisted that I had a great future ahead of me, by which she meant a job and a salary, but just as often she’d look at me and ask, “Do you think you’re really bright?” Quick smile. “Of course you are. You’re very very bright.” Pause. “But I wonder. We think you are. But shouldn’t we have a second opinion? One that’s more objective?” She subjected herself to the same doubts—I was so completely hers that I had to eat what she ate, even her self-hatred, as a fetus must live off its host’s blood. The great event of our household had been that my father had left us for someone else. Afterward, how could we like each other all that much, since we were all equally guilty of having driven him away? At least, we’d failed to keep him. Nor was our shared fate black as good ink or crisp as a crow’s wing on snow; we hadn’t been assigned clear, tragic roles we could play with any sort of despairing joy. Instead, we’d been shamed and we’d become vacant, neglected, shabby with neglect. I don’t mean to say that we exhibited interesting symptoms or made trouble for anyone. But we were shadows, like the dead after Orpheus passes them on his way through the Underworld, after this living man vanishes and the last sound of his music is lost to the incoming silence. All my life I’ve made friends and lost lovers and talked about these two activities as though they were very different, opposed; but in truth love is the direct and therefore hopeless method of calling Orpheus back, whereas friendship is the equally hopeless because irrelevant attempt to find warmth in other shades. Odd that in the story Orpheus is lonely, too. Helen Paper had a wide, regal forehead, straight dark hair pulled back from her face, curiously narrow hips and strong, thin legs. She was famous for the great globes of her breasts, as evident as her smile and almost as easy to acknowledge and so heavy that her shoulders had become very strong. How her breasts hung naturally I had no way of knowing, since in her surgically sturdy brassiere her form had been idealized into—well, two uncannily symmetrical globes, at once proud, inviting and (by virtue of their symmetry) respectable.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Unlike my idols I couldn’t play tennis or baseball or swim freestyle. My sports were volleyball and Ping-Pong, my only stroke the sidestroke.… My hands were always in the air. In eighth grade I had appeared in the class pageant. We all wore togas and marched solemnly in to a record of Schubert’s “Unfinished.” My sister couldn’t wait to tell me I had been the only boy who’d not sat cross-legged on the gym floor but resting one hand on a hip like the White Rock girl.… A man never gushes; men are either silent or loud. I didn’t know how to swear: I always said the final “g” in “fucking.” III Since Edmund White was born in 1940, he lived in round-number allegorical relation to the last six decades of our recent quick-change century. No intelligence stands readier to remember with perfect pitch a period whole-cloth: who else can tell us so exactly how its citizens then talked, dressed, contracepted, proceeded politically? So, at age forty, just at the start of the sexually liberated eighties (in 1982, the year after HIV first sent its silent tentacles among the erotically adventurous in Manhattan and San Francisco), White offered the world a seemingly autobiographical novel. It appears to map a boy’s coming to terms not simply with solitude, not just with his social destiny, but with a completely aestheticized vision only some scholastical and witty kid could so utterly perfect. The novel shows a child learning to face then exploit not just homo-sex, but sex in general. This work of principled sweep and great observational power also champions the centrality of Art as a governing quest. It offers this view with a faith that must recall Proust’s life project, his attempt to hold all of time, its characters at synchronous ages, all its warring textures, in one head, one work. But crucially, White also places the Erotic on a level of expressive possibility alongside the pursuit of work itself. “Love and Work.” Freud promised us two choices, in that order. But here sex replaces romantic love, even while groping elsewhere for it. If Love, in modern life, is really Sex, then Sex, undertaken with concentration and ambition enough, can ascend to Work, can’t it? The erotic is ranked, by the young man at the center of this fiction, as a great Darwinian organizing force for the good. We are told by White in 1982—using the voice of an erotically and cerebrally advanced fifteen-year-old facing his inaugural analyst—that life’s great divide really seems between those who are sexual, are “getting it” on a regular basis, and the others, lonely and—because silent—powerless:

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Was there an awareness that there is too much of real, uninvited pain, too much of hatred, oppression, enslavement, much too much, to add to it even in playacting? It was a time for asking those questions, at the same time that one underscored emphatically the leather faction's right to hold their ugly willing auctions; a time too to point out that that faction is not representative of the gay world, that one could and should support the bathhouse defendants against police sadism without condoning the paradox of a slave auction even in announced support of gay freedom (any more than one would logically condone the charade of lynching to support a black cause or an imitation concentration camp to assert Jewish pride). Yes, and it was a time for questioning oneself anew. For facing one's still-lingering fascination with that world. (Because in a period of my life I am not proud of—and no outsider even now to the beckoning “power” within S & M—I acted in an interlude with a man who begged for the humiliation I only too gladly provided, and afterwards he confessed he had found in me a surrogate for the man who had punished him in the concentration camp he had been incarcerated in as a boy. His story real or fantasy? It doesn't matter. The hateful image had scorched.) And it was a time to emphasize that the true “radical-ization” of the leather faction would come—if it came at all—only when the counter-revolutionary energy expended in even fantasy rage against our own and ourselves would be diverted into combating the real oppression, the real oppressors—and seeing that combat in the context of all the hungry evils that devour other minorities. Were any of those questions being asked by the “masters” and “slaves”? Were any connections being perceived? Perhaps. Perhaps, among some of those arrested. Perhaps, hopefully. Outwardly nothing changed. The prison door of the thriving S & M bar constructed to evoke a torture dungeon opened and closed nightly, just as before, as gay patrons entered and exited, unconcerned; and the “costume” bar, owned in part by the ubiquitous gay-liberationist, still saw gay men dressed as cops, posing in ludicrous imitation-authority and threat. The magazine that had spawned the auction still displayed photographs of costumed “torture,” its classified ads still pled for “humiliation.” And the cops? Did they see that they had busted a charade of their own very real brutality? Did they face their leering fears? And, assaulted by citizen outrage at the waste, did they alter their priorities to focus on the muggings, robberies, rapes—one every thirty minutes, it was estimated—and murders that pillage this city? No. The wasteful vendetta continued. Cops would lurk in bars to entrap homosexuals. Because courts might conceivably determine that a bar is “semi-private”—and therefore beyond the purview of the public-solicitation law—vice cops would solicit inside a bar and then reiterate the proposition outside, thus rendering it “public.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  It was selfish. Because the thought of consuming dead things, when he had been so close to dying, when he had wanted to die, was too much. Lionel waited for Charles to say something dismissive about vegetarians, for that moment when people projected onto him whatever lingering guilt they felt about the consumption of meat. He missed hamburgers terribly sometimes. “How do you know our mutual friend?” Charles asked. “I don’t think I’ve seen you at one of his dumb parties before.” Lionel was prepared for the abruptness of the transition this time. “We were in the same department,” he said. He had known the host for several years, first when they were undergrad interns in the computer science department—Lionel from Michigan, the host from Arizona. Then both of them had been accepted into the same applied mathematics program at Wisconsin, and they’d been students together there for a few years, though Lionel was more pure math, while the host was working on applications to shielding and space exploration. They met for coffee and lunch after and before seminars and bonded over the fact that they hadn’t been math prodigies as kids. They slept together that first, itchy summer, fresh from undergrad and waiting for their lives to change. The host was now on track to graduate early— his project had attracted interest from the Department of Defense, which wanted to turn it into a weapon to be deployed in foreign wars. “Oh, you’re a weird genius too, huh? That must be nice.” Charles whistled in fake appreciation. “Definitely not a genius,” Lionel said. The word made him a little queasy. “I’m not in school right now, anyway. I’m on leave.” Charles spun his fork around with a flick of his fingers. The metal flashed as it moved across his wrist and came to rest right side up. He did it again, just like that, a neat little trick. “Then what do you do?” “I proctor exams,” Lionel said. “You what now?” “I give exams for professors. I do entrance exams, too.” Lionel’s appetite shrank to a tiny white heat in the pit of his stomach. He was ashamed of proctoring only when he had to tell other people about it, and only when those people knew that he had once been a graduate student with good brain chemistry. He didn’t think proctoring was bad, but he could see how other people saw him the moment they heard it and how they appraised his life as it was by the metric of what it had once been. “You’re pulling my leg. From math genius to proctor? Is that even a real thing?” “It is,” Lionel said. “It’s what I do.” “How’d that happen?” “I just sort of fell into it,” Lionel said. “Steep fall.” “Not as steep as you’d imagine.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  But it was really, truly none of Alek’s business, so Charles put a little smugness in his turnout, let his hips roll and snap as he lifted into the air. He wouldn’t be bullied. • • • At the end of the class, Charles was putting his arms into his flannel when Farnland approached him. “Charles,” he said. “A word.” “All right.” Charles was soaked with sweat. Pins and needles ran down the outside of his leg to his toes. The afternoon light was brilliant through the windows. Their shadows stretched across the floor. “You were late. You smell like a distillery. And you dance like a bowlegged ox.” “That’s more than a word,” Charles said. He did try to look apologetic. “You are setting a terrible example. Think of the younger dancers,” he said, and Charles flinched. “You are a senior member of this program. Don’t make me regret fighting for you.” Think of the younger dancers , Charles repeated in his mind. Think of those young boys in their silk shirts at parties, with no one to look out for them, being given plastic cups of champagne. Think of the giddy high of being with people who understood what you did and what you loved instead of being shoved into a locker by a bunch of lacrosse jerks who got drunk on their dads’ boats and drowned on lazy summer nights. Think of those poor young dancers, aching knees and throbbing feet. Their eyes stinging with sweat. Think of the young dancers. Charles clenched his jaw and squared his shoulders. “I do think of them,” he said. Farnland sucked his teeth, the most ungraceful gesture Charles had ever seen him make. He looked at his fingernails as if Charles were worth less than what prospective dirt might be found there. He deserved that, he thought. Fair enough. “Your knee?” “Can barely feel a thing,” Charles ground out. In truth, he should have listened to Sophie last night and gone home to ice it. He had no business running through the snow after Lionel, and now dancing on it. “You’re listing,” Farnland said. “No way you’re making it through rehearsal tonight.” Charles had been selected by Farnland to dance in some Balanchine rip-off. It was all cheap schmaltz and feeling . Neither classical nor contemporary. It existed in that middle ground of hazily choreographed vaporware.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Please be quiet. I won’t hurt you.” We’re both bored. It’s six on a December night and the sky outside the filmy hotel curtains (they smell of coal smoke) has long been dark. The phone hasn’t rung all day—none of us is popular, that’s evident. Not my sister, not me, not Mom. “Ouch!” I whine. “That bandage is too tight!” “It’s not!” “It is so.” “It’s not.” “I’m telling you it is so.” “Well, just play with yourself,” my sister says. “I don’t want to play with you. You wanna know why? Do you? Wanna know why?” I’m sitting up in bed now, uneasy, wishing I hadn’t complained about the bandage. “I’ll tell you why: you smell bad. You do.” My sister sticks her face right into mine. One of her barrettes has come loose without her noticing, and suddenly an unexpectedly adult sweep of hair frames her face and caresses her shoulder. She’s so close that some of her hair grazes my cheek. “I do not,” I mumble uncertainly. Perhaps I do smell bad. But where is the bad smell coming from? My mouth? My bottom? My feet? I long to creep into the bathroom, to cup a hand over my mouth and nose and test my breath for foulness, then to examine my underwear for skid marks. Or is the bad smell inside me, the terrible decaying Camembert of my heart? “You do. You smell bad and I hate you. Wherever you go you smell bad, you stink up the place, how do you think I like having people think you’re my brother? And look at your big nostrils. And you’re such a big sissy, you can’t even throw a baseball, you throw like a girl, you can’t even walk right, you’re a gimp. You are. I’m not kidding.” Now it all seems too true. I’m an embarrassment—to my mother, my sister, most of all to myself. I haven’t a right to take up the space I occupy. I poison every room I enter. “Look at your nails,” my sister says, grabbing my hand and holding it under my nose for inspection. “You’ve got black gook under there. You’re icky. You really are. It’s probably poop. Do you play with your poop. You play with your poop, you play with your poop, you play with your poop.…” I can’t get her to shut up or to release my hand. Now she’s grabbed a pillow and stuffed it in my face. “Whatsa matter, can’t you take it, can’t you take it, play with your poop,” she’s chanting. I turn my head to breathe but she’s right there, applying the pillow to my face in this new position. Her terrible words continue, though the pillow muffles the sound. She’s planted a knee in my chest to hold me down. Terrified of suffocating, I push her off in a frantic burst of energy. I grab the nail scissors and stab her in the hand. Blood leaps out.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He missed the long talks with his advisor, Dr. Lauk, who had taken Lionel in after that summer program because Lionel was also interested in complex differential geometry, though Lionel didn’t like analysis and had struggled through his analytic geometry class. He even missed the mean, brutal hours of Dr. Nonan’s seminar on geometric isoforms and topology, the one class where he had gotten the minimum required B. Lionel remembered staring at the grade with great incredulity. No one in grad school got Bs unless something had gone wildly wrong. He remembered being summoned when that fall semester’s grade posted, and hearing Dr. Lauk say, with kindness that verged on condescension, “He can be a challenging instructor. You’ll do better next time.” The implication being that Lionel must retake the course and get an A because the subject matter intersected so deeply with his advisor’s specialty. There were moments in the spring semester when Lionel wondered if it was for his own benefit that he was retaking the class or if it was because he was being moved around a chessboard he couldn’t see, his graduate education a pawn passed between two egos. But even that he missed—the messy, ridiculous departmental politics, the rituals, all of it. But in his second year, Lionel had tried to kill himself. And now that was over. The boys wrote furiously. Lionel checked the time on his phone, then checked Instagram and Reddit and Twitter. He read a long thread about Wisconsin electoral maps and how Madison had recently been redistricted. He thought of the conversation he had overheard last night about Planned Parenthood being defunded. It often happened that two things that seemed unrelated in Lionel’s life were actually connected in the larger context of the world, and a network revealed itself to him in random, strange ways. Usually mediated via the internet, via social media, via someone saying something to someone at a dinner party, not even directly to him or about him. He was aware that he lived, in that way, amid the great matrix of the world’s concerns. He put his phone away, but then it pulsed and he took it out again. lunch? The text was from Sophie. The sudden shame made him dizzy. Because, of course, Charles had shown up at his apartment. Why else all those looks, that run-in outside the bathroom—what else had all that meant if not I see you. I want you. What else could all that have culminated in, if not Charles standing in the falling snow, taking the keys from Lionel’s hand, and letting them both inside? And Lionel had done it, knowing that the moment he followed Charles in, he was saying good-bye to Sophie and whatever friendship she might have had for him. Lionel stared down at his phone. u there? Proctoring. sounds terrible. lunch? Maybe not a good idea. why?

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  You’re decent. Some folks is still decent in this world.” Grace laughs. It is of course a ridiculous sentiment. And anyway, if you looked at it hard enough, they were the same in a way. That way being that they wanted men. All the times Grace and Davis used to run to this man after being chased by the dog from down the road. Or the way they’d been chased by goats when they’d visited their cousins farther out in the country. Or the way they’d hidden their faces when they met their great-grandparents, skin like polished wood and ancient- looking, hunched forward under their shawls, smelling like astringent creams. When she was younger and sleeping upstairs, Grace had sometimes felt a pressure on her chest or on her shoulders, holding her down, doing nothing else but that, pressing her against the bed until she was perfectly flat. She had tried to scream, to holler for someone to come and help her, but the weight on her chest had prevented it. She’d lie there all night, frozen, stuck inside her body, unable to do anything to get free. When she told Big Davis about it, he said, What made them made you, didn’t it? They don’t mean you no harm . As if some common origin could negate terror of the unknown. Because we were all made of the same fearsome stuff, nothing in the world could scare you if you looked it in the eye and saw the part of it that was yourself. It was nonsensical in the way that only wisdom could be, Grace thought. Old men and their little stories. “What made you made him ,” Grace replies. “You have bigger problems, little lady, than what your brother and me have between us. Mind your business.” Grace hums. Enid stares at her hard. Now who’s trouble? she can almost hear. It’s true that, growing up, Grace had been the one they watched like a hawk. Her grandmother used to say that boys made babies and girls brought them home, dropped them like kittens at the doorstep, and then who had to raise them but the parents or the grandparents? Nothing her grandmother hated more than the sight of a loose girl, which was to say every girl. When Grace was little, she was the one whose hair they combed all Sunday morning and the one they dressed in the stiff white polyester dress with a ruffle collar before church. She didn’t get to run through the woods that cut along by the cemetery. She didn’t get to crouch by the pews and play cars before the service started. No. Grace had to behave . Even on days when it was just her and Davis waiting to be collected by their parents, Grace would look up and see her grandmother and aunts looking out at her through the window. Their hard faces.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  (An S & M publication recently carried—and subsequently deleted—an ad for the National Socialist League—complete with swastika and eagle—though at least one leather club has refused its literature.) No, I am not a stranger to the world of violent sexual power. I am not speaking from a rarefied distance, but from within. I have worn the leather costume, have felt the surge at humiliating another. Once, I was no stranger to the props of S & M—yes, the belts, thrusting boots, straps for restraint. An admission not easily made, but necessary, so I can speak from experience. And I still feel the great rush when another submits. But I want to explore thoroughly what is really at play; and, knowing that much of what is called S & M is not, to separate and differentiate between the feeling of power implicit in virtually all sex relations, and the substitution of sex for pain, the humiliation of real S & M— to purge myself, because of my very real self-love, of the need for externalized hatred and contempt, thrust onto another. Yes—and I believe in the freedom to destroy oneself, and to allow oneself to be destroyed. I uphold the right of suicide. But I believe in the need for full awareness that one is destroying oneself or another, no matter how willingly. I believe in the necessity of exploring the real, not the rationalized, world of S & M. I believe that the energy produced by this hatred turned inward dissipates the revolutionary energy. Redirected, refunneled, that inward anger would be converted into creative rage against the real enemies from without. The conclusion is inescapable. The motivation of the “M”— as well as of the "S” — is self-hatred. There is no “S” in such gay relationships. The whimpering “masochist” and the “tough” posturing “sadist” are, in reality, only two masochists groveling in self-hatred. Gay S & M is the straight world's most despicable legacy. 859 P.M. The Baths. O N THE STREET, he touches his arms, round, full, hard. His need for the outlaw world fluctuates. Sometimes, like others within it, he stays away for days, even weeks. Sometimes he makes it only once a day, or once every other day, with one or perhaps only two persons, three. Other times he will sexhunt for many contacts, but only from Friday to Saturday, say, or only on Saturday, or only one night, one afternoon. There are times when he will have all his encounters at home, his or another's. Other times, like this swelling weekend, he commits himself entirely to the extreme hunt. He knows these fluctuations, variations, and modifications are so for the other outlaws too because he will see the same ones recurrently in the same shifting arenas, then not at all for long.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  Damian heard the buzzer that let him know he was to bring out the rum punches. Richard was a good actor. He widened his eyes and looked stunned. “You have a nude houseboy.” Stan smiled. “Do you like him? He’s stupid, but he’s a benefit.” Richard sipped his drink. “Benefit? In what way?” “You get to fuck him as much as you want. He can’t ever say no. It’s all he’s good for.” Damian trembled, worried he might give up the game. “Well, let me see this fellow.” Richard got up from his chair. As he approached Damian, he caught his toe on Stan’s lounger and spilled rum punch on Stan’s face and bathrobe. “Oh, I’m so sorry. That robe looks like it costs a fortune. I hope it doesn’t stain.” Damian saw Richard drip something from what looked like an eyedrop bottle into Stan’s punch. Damian immediately grabbed a towel and began drying Stan’s head and face, hoping to keep Stan from seeing what Richard was doing. He also positioned himself so his backside blocked Bob’s view. “That’s fucking enough, Damian!” Stan bellowed. “Get on all fours now!” Damian complied. “Why don’t you enjoy Damian’s ass?” Stan said. Richard balked. “Right now? In front of you?” “Of course. We’re all very open here. I’ll show you. I’ll go first.” Stan, fully erect, slid off the soiled robe. Damian bent his head in shame, knowing Richard was about to see him humiliated. “He’s already lubed?” Richard asked as Stan slid inside Damian in one long stroke. “He lets you bareback his ass?” Stan grunted. “Lubed, yes. He’s lubed twenty-four/seven. Bareback. He doesn’t have a choice.” Damian felt his face flush, wondering if Richard would still want him now. “C’mon, get naked and get inside him, buddy.” Stan waved Richard over. “No need to be shy. You look like you have a great body under that suit.” Stan stopped fucking to gulp his drink. Richard hadn’t budged. “If you want the job, you need to start pumping his rump.” Richard nodded and stepped forward to stroke Damian’s flank. “As soon as you’re done, I’ll fuck him like a madman.” “Fuck his ass now or get out of my house.” Stan guzzled more rum punch. Richard stripped off his shirt and had begun to unzip his pants when Damian felt Stan slow his thrusting. Stan mumbled something about his head and then slumped over, his dick popping out of Damian’s ass. Richard pulled Damian upright. “Quick, get some clothes!” Damian shook his head. “Bob is watching! Look out, he’s coming now!” Bob was bigger and meaner than Stan, and Damian braced himself to witness him punching out Richard. But as the big man came at the doctor like a bull, Richard reached into his pocket, whipped around and struck Bob in the neck. Bob went down instantly. “What hap—” “Taser. It won’t keep him down long. Get clothes now.” “I don’t have any. They got rid of them all!”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Charles slid this thumb against the nape of Lionel’s neck, and Lionel sighed. He stretched out in the seat next to Charles, turned back to the open window. The air, which very well could have been from a mountain all those years ago, was working something strange over him and the moment itself, reordering some necessary filaments inside him. He was on the verge of speaking, saying it, finally, as he had said some of it to Sophie in the café before Charles arrived, some edge of the truth, some bit of what had happened to him. He turned to Charles and opened his mouth, but his voice was snatched away on the wind. Charles turned to him, smiled. “What did you say, Lionel?” WHAT MADE THEM MADE YOU The tumor is inoperable. At the window, Grace watches her grandfather’s progress in the garden as he makes his way toward the house, stopping to pull up stray weeds or nudge a brick back into place. Dense clouds push in from the west, and the plum trees lining the long driveway rustle. The wind combs through the screen, pulls, releases. Her mother, Enid, has just arrived from her shift at the nursing home. She’s peeling one of the oranges from the fruit bowl with a kind of pointed nonchalance. The tension in her shoulders and the stiffness in her neck give the game away. Grace knows that when the orange is peeled and set in segments upon the little plate, Enid will offer them to her as though it were nothing, a trick she learned from the other nurses. Take some for yourself and destigmatize the process. It’s all so transparent. Now that Grace lives with Enid again, plates of food materialize on almost every surface. Crackers, fruit, soup, runny grits, bits of fish, or slices of low-sodium ham. It’s like being haunted by some sort of hospitable ghost. She pretends not to sense Enid’s desperation for her to eat. “The bottom’s going to drop out,” Grace says. Enid comes around the kitchen island, carrying the plate with the furry orange slices. “That so? Here, have some.” Grace wants to scream, but instead asks, “Heard from Davis?” “He’s doing well, last I heard. Not that he calls like he should,” she says, plucking pith from the oranges. She’s across from Grace at the table now, still wearing her uniform, the deep purple scrubs under the poly-cotton white coat. Orange stains speck the hem. The plastic ID tag is smeary in the light. “I suppose you hear from him more regularly than I do.” “He wants me to try with Granddaddy again,” Grace says. The oranges lie there like sad, soft worms. Sour spit fills the back of her throat, but it dries almost instantly, leaving a coppery residue on her tongue. “He should fight his own battles,” Enid says sharply.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Last week, on Glad Hill, he and Nolan got popped buying the pot they smoked earlier. Tate and Abe had said that this was it, this was the end of high cotton, and Nolan had shrugged. Nothing came of it, of course. No charge materialized, because it turned out that the cop who’d busted him had beaten a domestic charge the year before, thanks to Nolan’s dad. The thing that bugs Milton about it is not that Nolan gets off all the time. Nolan complained about his dad after the fact. He said he loved me, Nolan said. They don’t give a shit. It gets on Milton’s nerves. Nolan wouldn’t enjoy being treated like an animal circling his parents’ love like a too-small enclosure. Milton would just like a little elbow room. On the night Nolan got popped, the same cop delivered Milton home in the back of the cruiser, but didn’t turn the lights on. Instead, he sent Milton out into the cool night on unsteady legs, tipsy and a little queasy. His parents looked at him as though from a precipice and shook their heads. No, that’s it, Milton. No more chances. How many times was that already since spring? Four? Five? No, Nolan wouldn’t like it one bit, parents whose love had a long, reproachful memory. Idaho had materialized as a vague threat in September, and that threat had grown ever more solid until they came into his room a few days before and laid it all out for him. His father had put the pamphlet in his hand. Milton had taken it, though he couldn’t meet their gazes. His room smelled damp on that day. Outside, he could hear music from a few houses over. Maybe it was best that he got some time away. That he spent some time on his own, learning how to be a man on his own terms. To see what the world would hold for him if he kept on this way. But Milton had wanted to ask them, What way? Because he drank? Because he smoked? Because he ran with Nolan and Tate and Abe? Because he’d stopped going to church? Because he stopped praying? He had sat clenching the slick, laminated pamphlet, its cover featuring a tough-looking boy with a white line down his face, on one side smirking, sneering, mean, and on the other a stern, hard gaze. But Milton couldn’t tell which was meant to be the before and which was supposed to be the after. He’d stared at the pamphlet, thinking, What’s so wrong with me? They said they’d write him letters when he went—or his mom had, anyway. His dad said nothing except that he expected him to do something with this chance, not to piss it away. Fucking Idaho. “Come on,” Nolan says.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I had spent so much of my childhood sunk into a cross-eyed, nose-picking turpitude of shame and self-loathing, scrunched up in the corner of a sweating leather chair on a hot summer day, the heat having silenced the birds, even the construction workers on the site next door, and delivering me up to the admonishing black head of the fan on the floor slowly shaking from left to right, right to left to signal its tedious repetition of no, no, no, and to exhale the faintly irritating vacillations of its breath. No, no, no—those were the words I repeated to myself, not with force but as a Jesus prayer of listless grief. Energy in itself is a sort of redemption. No wonder we admire Satan. But if the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed Venetian blinds—oh, if that were the Devil I would fear him. That’s what Being Popular seemed to promise, a deliverance from the humiliation of daily life, its geological torpor, the dailiness that rusts the blade of resolve and rots the stage curtain, that fades all colors and returns all fields to pasture. Being popular was equivalent to becoming a character, perhaps even a person, since if to be is to be perceived, then to be perceived by many eyes and with envy, interest, respect or affection is to exist more densely, more articulately, every last detail minutely observed and thereby richly rendered. I knew that my sister wasn’t popular, at least not at school. She sat at home night after night and no matter how she styled her hair or wore her skirts she looked unliked, dowdy with dislike. Our mother told us she’d been popular as a girl, but she had grown up on a farm where families did everything together. How could I explain to her how much things had changed, that we kids scarcely admitted we had parents, that to us parents were as uninteresting as the rich in novels about backstairs life; they were large naive personages who ask irrelevant questions from time to time and from whom the truth must always be kept. In particular the logical or at least consistent standards of adults, their admiration of money, of substance, of homely virtue, were valuable to us kids precisely as rules to flout, for our preferences in clothes, music, people were rigorously whimsical.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “Long, yes, longer, longer,” Farnland called. “Think long, beautiful, easy, easy, that’s it.” Charles stretched until he could feel something solid shift upward in his back. It felt good, that hollow click in his spine. Then up, and back, his foot sliding forward, careful with his arm, not dead weight—floppy noodle, as his earliest teacher had called it. His waist burned where the tights cut into his skin and against his hip bones. That felt good, too. His body hummed to life. “Pliés,” Farnland said. “And I want them deep.” Charles thought he’d barf, but he held his guts inside as they all sank into plié. “Lot of shallow graves today.” Charles looked out over the rows of barres: dancers in leg warmers and joggers, jackets and quarter-zips. He felt at once relief and also distress at not seeing Sophie. If she could have seen the state of him, looking hungover and tired, it would have obviated a need for a discussion about what he had done with Lionel. As it was, now he would have to talk. Use words. Say things. They were honest and open about the people they slept with. But whereas Sophie found this easy, and at times pleasurable, Charles found it difficult. He didn’t like talking about the time he’d gotten his dick sucked at a party they’d both attended, or the time he’d done speed at the club they visited in Chicago, or the time he let one of the girls from the drama department think he was her boyfriend in order to score a meeting with her cousin, an agent who was coming through town. Charles always felt dirty, implicated. The act of telling her held a mirror up to what he’d done, which was ordinary and base and simple and just the kind of thing that people did with one another or to one another, but somehow, in the duplicating that retelling required, it became something else. When he could see himself, really see himself, he didn’t like what he saw. “Charles, are you with us or not?” Farnland’s voice carried through Charles’s thoughts, and he found himself in the wrong position, completely out of the music’s course. “Sorry,” he said, but Farnland gave him a long, exasperated look. Among the many lines and heavy folds, there were two bright blue eyes, as cold as the sea. Farnland gripped Charles’s elbow and one of his hips, putting him into position as if he were a small boy. Charles absorbed the dry hardness of the touch and let the humiliation settle into the pit of his stomach. “Are the rigors of second position too much for you?” Farnland asked. “Do you need a moment to prepare?” Charles was close enough to see the hateful moisture at the corners of the man’s eyes. There was a flicker of true sincerity in his voice, as if he truly believed that Charles found second position difficult. “Sorry,” Charles said.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  That afternoon Peter, Kevin and I went fishing in the little outboard. The weather was hot, muggy, clouded over, and we waited in vain for a bite. We’d dropped anchor in a marsh where hollow reeds surrounded us and scratched the metal sides of the boat. I was sweating freely. Sweat stung my right eye. A mosquito spoke in my ear. The smell of gasoline from the engine (tilted up out of the shallow water) refused to lift and float away. The boys were threatening each other with dead worms out of the bait jar and Peter’s calls and pounding feet had scared off every fish in the lake. When I asked them to sit still, they gave each other that same smirk and started mocking me, repeating my words, their voices sliding up and down the scale, “You could be more considerate.” After a while the joke wore thin and they moved on to something else. Somehow—but at what precise moment?—I had shown I was a sissy; I replayed a moment here, a moment there of the past days, in an attempt to locate the exact instant when I’d betrayed myself. We motored back over the glassy, steaming lake; everything was colorless and hot and drained of immediacy. In such a listless, enfeebled world the whine of the motor seemed particularly cruel, like a scar on the void. I went for a walk by myself. I plodded up and down the hills on the narrow road that passed the backs of cottages, which turned their faces to the lake. An old car full of black maids sputtered past. It was Wednesday evening; tomorrow was their day off. Tonight they’d stay at a Negro resort twenty miles away and dance and laugh far into the night, eat ribs, wear gowns, talk louder and laugh harder than they could the rest of the week in the staid houses where they served. Most of the time they were exiled, dispersed into the alien population; only once a week did the authorities allow the tribe to reconvene. They were exuberant people forced to douse their merry flames and maintain just the palest pilot light. At that moment I really believed I, too, was exuberant and merry by nature, had I the chance to show it. In the silence that ebbed in behind the departing car, the air was filled with the one-note chant of crickets. Their song seemed like the heartbeat of loneliness, a beat that sang up and down the wires of my veins. I was desolate. I toyed again with the idea of becoming a general. I wanted power so badly that I had convinced myself I already had too much of it, that I was an evil schemer who might destroy everyone around me through the poison seeping out of my pores. I was appalled by my own majesty. I wanted someone to betray.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The dorm master tiptoed past my open door. He was on the lookout for boys breaking rules. Across the hall from me at his own desk a square-jawed German lad—who wrestled for the team, excelled at trig and played records of music he called “easy listening”—was working a slide rule and jotting down figures in his minuscule hand. His glasses blazed when he cocked his head at a certain angle, as though the numerical intelligence projected light rather than drank it in. On the wall above his head was an Eton pennant, placed with mathematical precision at the correct, casual angle, Gustav’s concession to frivolity. The master tiptoed back past my door. In fact, he was cutting up, taking giant, slow-motion steps, his hands raised high as a marionettists’s, his mouth turned down as though he himself were a truant who feared making a floorboard squeak—good for a chuckle. In my letter to my father I used the word homosexuality, thereby breaking a taboo and forcing two responses from him: silence and the money I wanted. Much later my stepmother told me I’d caused my father weeks of sleepless despair and that at first he had chosen to believe I wasn’t really a homosexual at all, merely a poseur hoping to appear “interesting.” Dad never asked me later if I’d been cured. He was no doubt afraid to know the answer. Certainly he and I never discussed my problem. Indeed, horror of the subject led to a blackout on all talk about my private life. My father didn’t like other men; he had no close male friends and he behaved toward the men in his own family according to the dictates of duty rather than the impulses of his heart. He so often ascribed cunning to other men, a covert plotting, that he approached them as enemies to whom he must extend an ambiguous hand, one that when not offering a cold greeting could contract into a fist. I was one of the men he didn’t like. Or should I say he simply didn’t like my nature—the fact that I was drawn to art rather than business, to people rather than to things, to men rather than to women, to my mother rather than to him, books rather than sports, sentiments not responsibilities, love not money? And yet he always ended by lavishing his money on me, more than he spent on my sister, whom he really did adore in his obstinate, silent, astringent way.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He could still hear her voice, scratchy on the phone, when he called to say he wouldn’t be able to make it. “Your generation is killing this nation with your carelessness,” she’d said, and hung up on him before he could respond. He’d stood in the reception area of the psychiatric care facility, staring at his reflection in his phone screen, thinking, well, maybe that was true, maybe they were killing the country and killing the world, but they were also killing themselves, and what would it list on his death certificate as cause of death, if not carelessness, misadventure. It was a serious thing to kill a world. He’d stood there with the clipboard of paperwork in his hand, had only called her because the act of lifting the clipboard to sign his name had brought to mind the fact that at that moment he was supposed to be somewhere else, on campus, giving an exam instead of admitting himself. But she didn’t care about that, and he didn’t blame her. He’d caused a mess. She was entitled to her feelings. Lionel knew the café where Sophie worked—he avoided it because it was popular with undergraduates. It was crowded, noisy, the last place you could get any work done or be alone with your thoughts. But when he arrived via the seldom-used entrance from the adjoining library, he was surprised to find it empty except for Sophie and another barista. Sophie sat at a table near the window, looking out. Lionel wondered if she was looking for him—the window faced onto the quad and the usual entrance—and the thought touched him. But when the door shut behind him, she looked up and frowned in mock surprise. “You have your tricks,” she said. “Some.” At her table, he unwound his scarf and unzipped his jacket. She reached out and stuck her finger through a hole in the collar of his shirt. “What happened there?” she said. Lionel pulled his chin back and looked down as she traced the hole, then flattened the collar with a little pat. “There we go.” “Oh, thanks.” “Do you want something? To eat, to drink?” She had gotten up, rested her knuckles against her hip. She was wearing black tights and a sweater the color of weak tea. Lionel found it a little hard to make eye contact with her. He pressed his hands to his cheeks. “Oh, I’m fine. Well. Yes. A coffee,” Lionel said, and when she returned a few minutes later with the coffee in a small carafe, he asked, “How much do I owe you?” She slapped his arm. She had already touched him twice. It felt like he was racking up a debt he wouldn’t be able to repay. Yes, she’d said she knew about Charles, but about what did she know?

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  share only two details. In both cases the name of the monk is Serapion (a name widely shared by early Christian monks in Egypt, leading to no small confusion of personages with the name in the manuscript tradition). Moreover, in both the early and later versions of the story the penitent woman ends her reformation by enclosing herself in a cell featuring a small passage communicating with the outside world. Th is memorably grim detail is probably the principal point of connection between the earlier and more elaborate forms of the narrative. In other words, the more elaborate form of the prostitute’s legend was motivated precisely by the memorably gruesome form that her penance took. Th e Life, which Nau dated to the fi fth or sixth century, includes a brief prologue laying out the agenda of the story: to help those “who have fallen into the mire of sin and wish to repent.” In the fi rst line we meet the protagonist, who is now the prostitute rather than the monk. “Th ere was in Alexandria a certain maiden named Th ais, exceedingly beautiful, with a beauty that in fact surpassed all those who were ever admired for their  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N physical charm.” Th e spare canvas of the Egyptian desert has been replaced by a fi ctional landscape crowded with meanings. Th e supremely beautiful maiden is an artifi ce of the romantic imagination. Alexandria, the city par excellence, has ousted the “village of Egypt” as the home of the prostitute. And she is given a name: Th ais. Nowhere in the manuscripts of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers is the prostitute rescued by Serapion given a name. Indeed, the name Th ais is as likely as any other element of the story to be a pure concoction of the hagiographer’s fancy. More profoundly, the tale of desert wisdom could leave the woman nameless, because she was simply an avatar of sin. In the Life, she becomes a character, and symbolic associations will rapidly grow around her. Th e girl’s mother was an unscrupulous and worldly woman who placed her daughter in “the workshop of the dev il,” where the beauty of Th ais could be “sold to all who wish to violate her shamefully.” Men came from far and wide; they lost all self- control, dissipated their property, even turned to brigandage to subsidize their lust. Th e hero Serapion heard of this dia- bolical temptress and hastened to respond. Th e author of the Life mobilized what is surely one of the least felicitous meta phors in the library of Greek literature: “Like a wise fi sherman, ready with a baiting device, he hunts after the lamb to snatch her soul from the maws of the dev il.” In the Life it is Serapion’s mission to fi nd her, and he must go to the city to do so. Th e

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  woman— a stage actress and quite possibly a courtesan, for the two profes-sions shaded into one another in law, ideology, and reality— had attained a reputation stretching across the eastern Mediterranean. We need not doubt the ability of an exquisitely beautiful woman, in a world where respectability meant seclusion, to capture the public mind. But this nameless actress walked away from her fame. If Chrysostom is to be believed, her retirement caused such resentment that the governor was prodded to force her back on stage, going so far as to dispatch armed soldiers for the purpose. But having received the purifying waters of baptism, she could not be dislodged from the virgins who had received her. Some people, their every movement full of mysterious resonance, are destined to become symbols. Th is star of the stage who repented and retired among the virgins was to launch a thousand legends. Her story was ready-made for literary adaptation, and not only because of the sheer arc of her conversion. Her legend was born at an opportune moment. She lived in the age of mass conversion, during a generation that saw the ranks of the baptized grow at a startling pace. Th e waters of baptism fl owed over men and women who brought into the church diff erent depths of spiritual commitment. As society trudged listlessly into the Christian church, the entry of the penitent prostitute off ered crystalline sharpness. Her story of repen- R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D  tance struck a chord. Th e female body was a symbol beyond time and cir- cumstance. Across ancient literature, the woman’s body stood as a cipher, capable of expressing the most intensely felt beliefs about the order of the world. Th e stark opposition between purity and pollution, between honor and shame, was endlessly reworked in the literary imagination. But the transition from one pole to the other, from purity to corruption or vice versa, was almost never compassed, precisely because the woman’s body was an objective correlative for an entire state of being. Th e passage of a prostitute’s body from prurience to penitence handed Christian authors a fi gure that not only resonated in an ancient arcade of symbols. Quite inadvertently, the penitent prostitute transcended the very logic of an immemorial symbolic architecture. Here we will trace the embodiment of shame and sin in prose narratives spanning the high and late empires. Th e claims made are, at one level, liter- ary. While it has been recognized that early Christian literature is related to the Greek romance, the depth of Christian engagement with the dynamics of female honor in pre- Christian fi ction remains to be fully explored. Th e