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.

Page 162 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  36 “As I entered into judgment with your fathers in the wilderness of the land of Egypt, so I will enter into judgment and contend with you,” says the Lord GOD . [Num 11 ; Ps 106:15 ; 1 Cor 10:5–10 ] 37 “I will make you pass under the rod [as the shepherd does with his sheep when he counts them, and I will count you as Mine and constrain you] and bring you into the bond of the covenant [to which you are permanently bound]. [Lev 27:32 ] 38 “And I will separate from you the rebels and those who transgress against Me; I will bring them out of the land where they temporarily live, but they will not enter the land of Israel. Thus you will know [without any doubt] that I am the LORD . [Heb 4:2 , 3 ] 39 “As for you, O house of Israel,” thus says the Lord GOD , “Go, let everyone serve his idols; but later you shall most certainly listen to Me, and you shall no longer profane My holy name with your gifts and with your idols. 40 “For on My holy mountain, on the high mountain of Israel (Zion),” says the Lord GOD , “there the whole house of Israel, all of them in the land, shall serve Me. There I will [graciously] accept them, and there I will seek (require) your offerings and the choicest of your gifts, with all your holy and sacred things. 41 “I will accept you [graciously] as a pleasant and soothing aroma when I bring you out from the peoples and gather you from the lands in which you have been scattered; and I will prove Myself holy and manifest My holiness among you in the sight of the nations. [Eph 5:2 ; Phil 4:18 ] 42 “And you will know [without any doubt] that I am the LORD , when I bring you into the land of Israel, into the land which I swore to give to your fathers. 43 “There you will remember your ways and all your deeds with which you have defiled yourselves; and you will loathe yourselves in your own sight because of all your evil deeds which you have done.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I couldn’t sort it out but I decided “passive” sounded less curable. “What?” Face crimson I shouted, “Passive!” I was medically disqualified from the army. The idea that my place would be taken by someone else, perhaps even a gay man too nervous to admit to his “tendencies,” didn’t trouble me in the least. A belief in morality is based on a belief in the group. I distrusted everyone. Hawthorne’s dim view of human nature confirmed mine, although I did not believe in Original Sin, only sin, far too common to be original. Of course I pretended to entertain normal scruples; I didn’t want people to look down on me.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  good food—I was planning a cold supper.” Annie had tried to prevent my father from opening the drain, but once he did she calmed down and packed her bag. My stepmother drove her to the station and waited as I put her on the train. On the platform Annie said, “Are you furious?” “No, it serves them right,” I said smiling. “I wish I had your guts—they need to be shocked.” “I wasn’t trying to shock them. But no matter. I don’t see how you came out of this family. You’re so much better than they are—sweeter, more open.” I tasted her praise but suspiciously, as though the candy might be poisoned. Like my sister, who scorned our real mother’s habit of praising herself, I felt I was being honest only when I said the worst things about myself. Now, all these years later, I realize one self-evaluation is as true as another and that my mother’s relentless Pollyannism was a less melancholy and more efficient way of muddling through than my gloom or my sister’s saturnine honesty. Nor did my sister’s honesty keep her from talking herself into marrying a man she didn’t love and becoming the suburban mom she had a drive but no talent to impersonate. My sister was ashamed of my mother and me for being so weird. She locked herself into an iron-maiden normality that gave her no room to breathe. She was stifling as she mixed the frozen orange juice on wintry mornings, attended PTA meetings, baked brownies, suffered the attentions of a dull, doting husband. Her upper lip would swell every time he wanted to make love to her. She sipped from bottles of liquor she’d secreted all over the house (mouthwash bottles, perfume bottles, Coke empties under the sink, a Lysol bottle in the spare bathroom). After Christmas vacation back at school I was invited by William Everett Hunton to a gay dance. “Spit-polish your Mary Janes,” he said, “and pray a man will see reflected in them up your skirt that you don’t have any panties on, you naughty thing.” Someone had a studio apartment just above a used-textbook store on a corner of an otherwise nonresidential block. There at ten on a Saturday night in January, I found myself armed with a cigarette and beer (one of the four cans William had had to buy for me with my money, since I was still below drinking age). We sat on top of stacks of books, sipped and watched the twenty men squeezed into the small room. I didn’t know any of the other fellows. I’d never seen any of them at the toilets. I suspected that handsome gay men all knew each other and avoided public cruising. For the first time William seemed shy, but he said he was simply trying to butch it up.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  We didn’t go back to bed, neither then nor ever, but the next semester I had a room of my own in a boardinghouse and Mick would borrow it every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon when I was in class. He used it as a place where he could sleep with his girlfriend. Once I found a single drop of blood on my sheets. Often I could smell the scent of his clean but athletic and unperfumed body. By that time he’d been teased so much for his smile—and had even had a caricature drawn in which he was all teeth—that he’d lost his naturalness. The next year he dropped out of school and joined the paratroopers. Two days after the bachelor dinner, William Everett Hunton called me at three in the afternoon and begged me to hurry over to the law quad. When I arrived, there was Annie slumped outside his door, barefoot, wearing a pretty rose silk slip and nothing else, her beehive collapsed. She looked up at me with huge muddy eyes, but the clinch of recognition quickly relaxed and she glanced away, hopeless. “For God’s sake, Annie, get up!” I shouted, as concerned about the scandal she was making as the pain she was suffering. The minute I spoke, the door flew open and framed William. “Thank heavens you’ve come.” He looked with fear and loathing at Annie. “I see you’ve met my little doggie. Don’t pet her. We’re leaving her out here to punish her. She barked all night. You can call her Sam.” He yanked me into the room, after I caught a glimpse of a mad grin on Annie’s face at the name Sam. She even mouthed it silently. And then her mouth turned from comic to tragic, and her eyes filled with tears. As soon as he’d closed the door he leaned up against it, as though to keep Sam out. “Oh, my dear, you’d never guess the cheap paperback I’ve made of my life, pure roman de gare —why wasn’t I content to stay a thoughtless queen in quest of big dicks? This GF (by which I mean ‘genital female’ to distinguish her from us, darling, who are women by choice, not by necessity, though in your case I do see the iron hand of fate)—this GF has been turning my life into hell. I haven’t been to class for a week and, listen!” We stood stock still. “Do you hear the typewriters? They keep that up night and day, typing up class notes, they never stop. Or do you think it’s just a tape of typing on a loop to torment me? I may be smart , but more in the sense of isn’t-that-a-smart-hat, anyway, there’s no way to fake an exam on the tort, which I persist in seeing as a soggy onion quiche—or as what you are, a cheap Southern tart who’s plumb wore out.” “But what about Annie?

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  While Murray’s private sexual life suggested far more fluidity and nonconformity to heteronorms, her desire to move into public life subjected her to the disciplining forces of racial heteronormativity. The proper performance of the politics of respectability was a nonnegotiable prerequisite for race women’s ascent to leadership, and while the discourse of respectability emerged specifically to combat notions about Black women’s hypersexuality and (hetero)sexual deviance—a charge which left them vulnerable to rape—respectability demanded an allegiance to the proper performance of functional heterosexual unions as evidence of African American’s fitness for citizenship, and also for race women’s leadership. In fact, presumptive heterosexuality has been so normatively entrenched in the study of Black women’s lives that there has been very little sustained public dialogue about the lack of traditional heterosexual relationships in the lives of race women like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McLeod Bethune, or Ella Baker, all of whom were widowed or divorced, and apparently disinterested in remarrying.61 Acknowledging the complicated and inextricable relationship between race and sexuality is critical to understanding Murray’s conflicts and the ways it informed her public and private personas. Candice Jenkins argues that “in fact the ‘political’ and the ‘intimate’ may be mutually constitutive signs for the Black subject,” so much so, that “it may not be possible, or sensible, to think about racial identity without thinking, simultaneously, of intimate subjectivity for African Americans.” The larger implication is that “the ‘public’ and ‘private’ faces of Blackness cannot and perhaps should not, be distinguished with any great ease.”62 Murray had become a victim of a racial ideology that Candice Jenkins refers to as the salvific wish, an iteration of the politics of respectability, which is “best defined as the desire to rescue the Black community from racist accusations of sexual and domestic pathology through the embrace of bourgeois propriety.”63 The salvific wish is a “response to the peculiar vulnerability of the Black subject with regard to intimate conduct,” which leaves “Black bodies, understood as sites of sexual excess … [as] doubly vulnerable in the intimate arena—to intimacy itself as well as to the violence of social misperceptions surrounding Black intimate character.”64 Murray’s own stated allegiances to heterosexuality might therefore more appropriately be read in the context of the salvific wish and its beguiling possibilities for combating Black social ills.65

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Continuing on this wise and enjoying great pleasure and delight one of the other, they knew not how to do so secretly but that, one night, Lisabetta, going whereas Lorenzo lay, was, unknown to herself, seen of the eldest of her brothers, who, being a prudent youth, for all the annoy it gave him to know this thing, being yet moved by more honourable counsel, abode without sign or word till the morning, revolving in himself various things anent the matter. The day being come, he recounted to his brothers that which he had seen the past night of Lisabetta and Lorenzo, and after long advisement with them, determined (so that neither to them nor to their sister should any reproach ensue thereof) to pass the thing over in silence and feign to have seen and known nothing thereof till such time as, without hurt or unease to themselves, they might avail to do away this shame from their sight, ere it should go farther. In this mind abiding and devising and laughing with Lorenzo as was their wont, it befell that one day, feigning to go forth the city, all three, a-pleasuring, they carried him with them to a very lonely and remote place; and there, the occasion offering, they slew him, whilst he was off his guard, and buried him on such wise that none had knowledge of it; then, returning to Messina, they gave out that they had despatched him somewhither for their occasions, the which was the lightlier credited that they were often used to send him abroad about their business.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I became the serious young husband bespectacled and dignified, she the wife in need of protection, as though my edge of a few weeks in New York had somehow made me a native. Having an actual woman at my side preempted my fantasy of being a woman, a fantasy that was as shameful as it was deep. One day, while browsing at the Gotham Book Mart, I stumbled on a book by the first sex-change, written in the 1930s. I slumped to the floor and read the whole book straight through, sweating in my overcoat. I read until the sunlight began to fade. My face burned with horrified recognition of this tale of a Dutch painter who felt he must at all costs liberate the dryad locked inside his male cortex. Here were the photographs of the before and after handwriting (vigorous downstrokes turned to rounded curves) and the before and after paintings (Mondrian to Marie Laurencin) and before and after bodies (Van Dyke and glinting pince-nez to a nearly erased face peeping out from under a cloche hat, the tottering thin body supported in the wintry garden of the clinic by a German nurse). The post-op artist insisted on having not only his sex changed on his documents (a whim that the game Dutch officials were willing to oblige) but also his rebirthday (refused). In the painter’s eyes, a lengthening pendulous age, not mere pudenda, had been the culprit; he had considered the surgery to be a renaissance. When he met his mother afterward, he could scarcely remember her. He chose as a husband an old friend of the family who’d agreed to marry him once he’d become a she. Her desire to have a child sent her back to have a second operation, from which she never recovered. The shorter and shorter journal entries, the indefinitely extended vacation of the performing surgeon, the patient’s horrible pain—all led to the suspension dots of the conclusion, three bloody drops on a snowy page. I was summoned to my army physical. With all these pale, tattooed boys I stripped and bent over, dressed and filled out forms. Here and there in the crowd I heard an arresting accent or saw eyes flashing with defiance; these anomalies were assembled at the end of the day in the psychiatrist’s office. He was almost deaf. Perhaps to be spiteful he’d moved his desk out of his office into the center of the waiting room. I heard each deviant shout the details of his problem. I had checked the box “homosexual tendencies” (the army recognized nothing more definite), but the doctor pretended he couldn’t see why I’d been referred to him. “Here, here!” I shouted, pointing. “Where? What? Oh. Homosexual. Tendencies. Have you tried psychiatric treatment?” “Yes,” I shouted. “And?” “Useless. No. Good.” “Are you the active partner or the passive partner?” I’d never thought in these terms before. Did “active” mean the one who sucked (the “girl”) or the one who fucked (the “boy”)?

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [James 1:19 ] 28 Even a [callous, arrogant] fool, when he keeps silent, is considered wise; When he closes his lips he is regarded as sensible (prudent, discreet) and a man of understanding. Proverbs 18 Contrast the Upright and the Wicked 1 H E WHO [willfully] separates himself [from God and man] seeks his own desire, He quarrels against all sound wisdom. 2 A [closed-minded] fool does not delight in understanding, But only in revealing his personal opinions [unwittingly displaying his self-indulgence and his stupidity]. 3 When the wicked man comes [to the depth of evil], contempt [of all that is pure and good] also comes, And with inner baseness (dishonor) comes outer shame (scorn). 4 The words of a man’s mouth are like deep waters [copious and difficult to fathom]; The fountain of [mature, godly] wisdom is like a bubbling stream [sparkling, fresh, pure, and life-giving]. 5 To show respect to the wicked person is not good, Nor to push aside and deprive the righteous of justice. 6 A fool’s lips bring contention and strife, And his mouth invites a beating. 7 A fool’s mouth is his ruin, And his lips are the snare of his soul. 8 The words of a whisperer (gossip) are like dainty morsels [to be greedily eaten]; They go down into the innermost chambers of the body [to be remembered and mused upon]. 9 He who is careless in his work Is a brother to him who destroys. 10 The name of the LORD is a strong tower; The righteous runs to it and is safe and set on high [far above evil]. 11 The rich man’s wealth is his strong city, And like a high wall [of protection] in his own imagination and conceit. 12 Before disaster the heart of a man is haughty and filled with self-importance, But humility comes before honor. 13 He who answers before he hears [the facts]— It is folly and shame to him. [John 7:51 ] 14 The spirit of a man sustains him in sickness, But as for a broken spirit, who can bear it? 15 The mind of the prudent [always] acquires knowledge, And the ear of the wise [always] seeks knowledge. 16 A man’s gift [given in love or courtesy] makes room for him And brings him before great men. [Gen 32:20 ; 1 Sam 25:27 ; Prov 17:8 ; 21:14 ] 17 The first one to plead his case seems right, Until another comes and cross-examines him. 18 a To cast lots puts an end to quarrels And decides between powerful contenders. 19 A brother offended is harder to win over than a fortified city, And contentions [separating families] are like the bars of a castle. 20 A man’s stomach will be satisfied with the fruit of his mouth; He will be satisfied with the consequence of his words.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  She’d got it into her head that William had found her repulsively fat, and she’d spit with scorn at the reflection in the mirror of her meager breasts and nearly fleshless hips. She longed for the purity of a boy’s body (a boy before puberty). She’d found another girl at school with the same obsessions. They slept all day, prided themselves on their luminous paleness, grew their hair very long. They wrote poetry and began to go to cocktail parties with professors; they were invited by a teaching fellow in art history whom they’d befriended. At midnight they’d get together in Annie’s dorm room, light candles, and take several hours to eat two cucumbers. The rest of the time they lived on vodka, cigarettes, and black tea. O’Reilly hospitalized Annie for not eating, but she tore the intravenous tubes out of her arms and trotted frantically up and down the stairs to work off the disfiguring calories. I took her home to my father’s for Christmas. My stepmother gave us a tour of the house, as Midwesterners will do. We looked at cedar closets, the linen cupboard with enough sheets to outfit an infirmary, the whole cooked turkey and cold ham waiting in the fridge for our midnight snacks. We inspected the basement, saw the furnace, the bar locked tight against pilfering maids, the Ping-Pong table. “If you kids feel in the mood for a game,” Dad said, “even in the middle of the night, go right ahead since it’s soundproof down here.” “Anyway, you’ll be up,” my stepmother said to my father sourly. She launched into a recital of his annoying nocturnal habits. “He doesn’t get up till late afternoon, and at six in the evening he sits down to a breakfast of a pound of bacon. I’ve had to go my own way. Otherwise I’d never have had a life.” Which was my father’s cue to brag about his wife’s social successes as chief Friend to the Symphony, as docent at the art museum, and as the star of Mr. Feltrinelli’s painting class. She said, “I did a portrait of your dad as a sad clown and then a sort of Michigan landscape that got out of hand so I made it abstract but it’s kinda cute anyway.” She was also going to play Scrooge in a Christmas production for the Home for the Incurables (“If only I can get my lines down. Will you help, Annie? I’ve got a wonderful costume and beard and bah-humbug all worked out”). In her busy life, slide shows of trips to Mexico alternated with four-hand piano renditions of “Mister” Haydn’s symphony (“Thank heavens he wrote so many; we girls just adore him, he’s easy to count to and the bass part is good for beginners”). My father distrusted men and felt uncomfortable around them, but he came to life near a pretty girl.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  “Or men,” I conceded, “though Freud, I’m afraid, didn’t encourage women to be very ambitious.” “Who does? Certainly no one at this school. My theology professor at the University of Chicago was more interested in his women students than the painting instructors here are. I guess they believe the female spirit is earthbound and only the male is creative.” “Maybe they think the girls will all get married.” “Not me,” she said. I asked her why. She threw out one reason after another but none seemed to justify her indignation. When I teased her, as I’d heard other men do a hundred times, and told her she would surrender to the right man, tears of anger sprang to her eyes. Anger, I guess, or maybe she was hurt that I understood her so little. I took her hand and stroked it. I was sick I’d vexed her. “Good,” I said, “because I’m never going to marry either.” “Really?” she asked, smiling as she slowly pushed the tears away with the back of her other hand. “Will you be famous all alone?”

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  27 “Nor do they lie beside the fallen heroes of the uncircumcised, who went down to Sheol with their weapons of war, whose swords were laid [with honors] under their heads. The punishment for their sins rested on their bones, for the terror of these heroes was once in the land of the living. 28 “But you will be broken in the midst of the uncircumcised and you will lie [without honors] with those who are slain by the sword. 29 “Edom is there also, her kings and all her princes, who for all their power and strength are laid with those who were slain by the sword; they will lie [in shame and defeat] with the uncircumcised and with those who go down to the pit. 30 “The princes of the north are there also, all of them, and all the Sidonians, who in spite of the terror resulting from their power, have gone down in shame with the slain. So they lay down uncircumcised with those slain by the sword and bore their disgrace with those who go down to the pit. 31 “Pharaoh will see them, and he will be comforted for all his hordes slain by the sword—Pharaoh and all his army,” says the Lord GOD . 32 “Though I instilled a terror of him in the land of the living, yet he will be made to lie down among the uncircumcised along with those slain by the sword, even Pharaoh and all his hordes,” says the Lord GOD . [Is 19 ; Jer 46 ; Zech 14:18 , 19 ] Ezekiel 33 The Watchman’s Duty 1 A ND THE word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2 “Son of man, speak to the sons of your people [who are exiled in Babylon] and say to them, ‘If I bring a sword on a land, and the people of the land take one man from among them and make him their watchman, 3 and he sees the sword coming on the land, and he blows the trumpet and warns the people, 4 then whoever hears the sound of the trumpet and does not take warning, and a sword comes and takes him away, his blood will be on his [own] head. 5 ‘He heard the sound of the trumpet but did not take warning; his blood shall be on himself. But if he had taken warning, he would have saved his life. 6 ‘But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet and the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, he is taken away because of his corruption and sin; but I will require his blood from the watchman’s hand.’ 7 “Now as for you, son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel; so you shall hear a message from My mouth and give them a warning from Me.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  of those hairless arms and legs, imagine what they’d look like in cross section, and the full, vulgar mouth redeemed by that truly classical nose, so severe and martial, the only truly Greek thing in this whole fuckin’ cheap rag.” I said, “Mnm, yes, Lou, he is well-built.” Lou looked up at me startled, then a funhouse laugh rumbled up out of his depths, “Well! Built!” the laugh quickened in astonishment and sent him down the rapids. “Bunny,” he said, gasping for air, “you look so pained. How dreadful for you to be with a moony old queen like me,” and he rolled on his bed with fiendish glee. The only dreadful thing was my realization that at nineteen I was already too old for Lou. I’d been waiting and waiting year after year to grow up so I could lead the gay life, and all the while I’d been wasting my most precious capital, my youth. Now my face was already disfigured with a beard I had to shave every second or third day, my legs were grotesquely hairy—at least there was some fuzz below the calves—and I had none of the baby fat left that Lou searched out with a magnifying glass on Bobby Phalen’s thighs or just above his small waist (“Do you see the shimmering ambiguity of that impertinent randy young maleness and those packets of girlish softness, just like Donatello’s David?”). Lou recognized, as everyone had to, that homosexuality was sick; in fact, he insisted on the sickness. Although not spontaneously given to campiness, he’d catch my eye in the midst of his own lip-licking perusals of Bobby Phalen’s thighs and touch his chest with his great broken hand and murmur, “I’m not a well woman ...” But through some curious alchemy he’d redeemed our illness by finding beauty in it. He loved Baudelaire, and like Baudelaire he searched out beauty in whatever was foul, artificial, damned, although those words, too Continental to be hip, would have embarrassed him. He liked everything deformed by the will toward beauty, whether it was a ballet dancer’s mangled feet and duck walk, a nun’s pallor and shaved skull, or a trumpet player’s split pulpy lips. In those days S-and-M had not yet become popular. Lou was forced to admire things too tame for his radical taste (peroxided hair, drag), but those he admired fiercely. Whereas William Everett Hunton wanted to go straight (or said he did), and spent a lot of time wanly imagining how warm and secure marriage must make men feel, Lou despised squares. He would proudly hold my hand as we walked down the street, and loved shocking the little old ladies in our apartment building with his sawed-off blue-jean shorts. If I got too folksy-chummy with the waitress or came out with an opinion worthy of our fathers, he’d blush and hang his head.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Williams unapologetically insinuated Black women into the discourse of the new woman, a term that sought to characterize white women who were involved in the progressive movements at the turn of the century.25 Not only were Black women new women, but they were the real new women, even more so than their white counterparts! The role that Williams ascribed to Black new women is even more telling. In language reminiscent of both Lucy Laney and Pauline Hopkins’s true race woman, Williams described the African American new woman as “an educator of public opinion.” Their job was to shift public perception and ideas about African American women through their work on the public stage. This call for Black women to shift public opinion, through both their pristine embodiment of respectable Black womanhood and their choice to make visible the particular struggles and precarity that attended to Black women’s lives, exemplifies Cooper’s ideas of using embodied discourse as a textual and discursive strategy to combat negative and damaging ideas about Black women. Undoubtedly, these ideas were steeped in moral condescension toward Black women of lower-class status. Williams balked at the treatment of nonelite colored women who had “been left to grope their way unassisted toward a realization of those domestic virtues, moral impulses and standards of family and social life that are the badges of race respectability.”26 Though her views were steeped explicitly in respectability politics, she also critiqued middle-class Black people for their neglect of the Black poor. Moreover, she continued: There has been no fixed public opinion to which they could appeal; no protection against the libelous attacks upon their characters, and no chivalry generous enough to guarantee their safety against man’s inhumanity to woman. Certain it is that colored women have been the least known, and the most ill-favored class of women in the country.27 Here, Williams turns to the notion of changing public opinion as the animating force of race women’s “intellectual activism.”28 Reshaping the public discourse about Black women topped the list of racial priorities of race women and of the NACW’s intellectual agenda. Black women’s strategic deployment of respectability, on the one hand, and embodied discourse that pointed to the extreme racial and sexual vulnerability Black women experienced, on the other, was critical to shifting public perception and opinion about the value of Black women’s lives.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  After a song or two, the dads drifted off the dance floor, while the girls kicked off their high heels. They jumped around in little scrums to “clean” pop songs such as Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” As I slipped out the door, “Let It Go,” the anthem from Frozen, came on. At the chorus, like young women everywhere, the girls flung their arms extravagantly wide and belted the words. The fathers looked on, smiling indulgently, apparently unaware that the point of the song—“No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I’m free!” and “That perfect girl is gone”—is that Elsa, the princess, is coming into her power, rejecting the restrictive, false morality that was imposed on her by her father, the king. The Good-Person Checklist Christina had known Brandon since kindergarten. They chased each other on the school playground, went to each other’s birthday parties at the local skating rink. He won first prize in the middle school science fair, she took second. They shared their first kiss after the winter formal during their junior year. Over time, their physical intimacy deepened, but the specter of the Church was never far from her mind. “It was like, ‘My boyfriend took off my shirt. What if other people find out?’” she recalled. “Even now, I can logically talk myself out of those feelings, but it’s all still there. There are degrees of shame and guilt that are probably permanently embedded in me. I wish that wasn’t so. It haunts a lot of my actions.” She paused thoughtfully. “But then, I don’t know where the line is between how I was raised and what’s just my personality. By nature, I’m a very cautious person.” Perhaps. Yet when I met Christina, she was planning a semester abroad in Botswana, which seemed pretty nervy to me. She’d also purposely chosen to attend a college that would challenge her long-held values, and sought housing that would push her even further. Christina’s willingness to step so far out of the bubble of her upbringing—something that’s hard for any young person to do regardless of her politics—struck me as admirable, even brave. She couldn’t fully explain why she’d done it. It may have been because her parents weren’t as conservative as her teachers. Christina’s mother never contradicted the school’s teaching on chastity, but she drew the line at its condemnation of homosexuality as a sin. “She just told me straight out, ‘That’s not true,’” Christina said. Beyond that, though, Christina always felt different from her peers. The other kids in her grade were white, and she resembled her Filipino father; she was the only Asian in the entire school. In middle school, boys teased her about the shape of her eyes, the color of her skin; it made her feel, even to this day, unattractive, undesirable. That sense of difference, of alienation, may have been enough to set her searching.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  For I am ruined, Because I am a man of [ceremonially] unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.” 6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs. 7 He touched my mouth with it and said, “Listen carefully, this has touched your lips; your wickedness [your sin, your injustice, your wrongdoing] is taken away and your sin atoned for and forgiven.” Isaiah’s Commission 8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!” 9 And He said, “Go, and tell this people: ‘Keep on listening, but do not understand; Keep on looking, but do not comprehend.’ 10 “Make the heart of this people insensitive, Their ears dull, And their eyes dim, Otherwise they might see with their eyes, Hear with their ears, Understand with their hearts, And return and be healed.” 11 Then I said, “Lord, how long?” And He answered, “Until cities are devastated and without inhabitant, And houses are without people And the land is utterly desolate, 12 The LORD has removed [His] people far away, And there are many deserted places in the midst of the land. 13 “And though a tenth [of the people] remain in the land, It will again be subject to destruction [consumed and burned], Like a massive terebinth tree or like an oak Whose stump remains when it is chopped down. The holy seed [the elect remnant] is its stump [the substance of Israel].” Isaiah 7 War against Jerusalem 1 N OW IT came to pass in the days of Ahaz the son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezin king of a Aram (Syria) and Pekah the son of Remaliah, king of Israel, went up to Jerusalem to wage war against it, but they could not conquer it. 2 When the house of David (Judah) was told, “Aram is allied with Ephraim (Israel),” the hearts of Ahaz and his people trembled as the trees of the forest tremble in the wind. 3 Then the LORD said to Isaiah, “Go out to meet Ahaz [king of Judah], you and your son b Shear-jashub, at the end of the aqueduct of the Upper Pool, on the highway to the c Fuller’s Field; 4 and say to him, ‘Take care and be calm, do not fear and be weak-hearted because of these two stumps of smoldering logs, on account of the fierce anger of [King] Rezin and Aram and of the son of Remaliah (Pekah, usurper of the throne of Israel).

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I became the most persistent street cruiser in town. For someone who till now had had a rather irritable, short-fused fussiness about wasting time, I was suddenly willing to turn whole acres of time over to pasture. Like a hunting lion, indifferent to the beauties of nature and the night but excruciatingly alive to even the smallest twitch or chirr, I paid no attention to the buildings around me and after staring at them hundreds of hours could not have told you if they had Ionic or Corinthian capitals or even columns; yet the moment someone male lingered for even a second, slowed his pace a fraction, or looked back with a frown, conspicuously snapping his fingers in the air to mime remembering something (transparent alibi), I had taken his photo, cured it, and glued it into a special identity kit just for him. I learned I couldn’t go home unsatisfied. At the beginning of the evening I’d rush haughtily past Fatty or Gramps, but four hours later I’d be on my knees in an alleyway doing him. And I learned once is never enough. Nor is twice. I felt a blind hatred for (and shame before) anyone who interrupted my cruising—a strolling family or a boy and girl on a date who sat on a bench to neck, if that bench was my territory. The boredom I underwent was intense, painful, hard work, since all disciplined thoughts had been crowded out and soon in the toilets I’d even traded in my Chinese flashcards for unadulterated stupor. I learned that everyone else in the world was less interested in sex than I. The others reached a point where they’d had enough. They stood, buttoned up, and hurried off, irked they’d wasted so much time on nothing. But I had no shred of dignity left to button. The other fairies could be spooked by a slowly passing cop car, or they would withdraw when the prey became too scarce. Not me. I was still there, blue with the cold, beating my gloved hands for warmth. I’d had the same feeling when I was a child. I was the one who wanted to play late into the cold and the dark and to roughhouse (you be the rough, I’ll be the house). Just to feel that contact with other boys’ bodies, their knees burning into my biceps, their weight resting on my chest, or a strong forearm choking my neck from behind (I leaned closer into my tormentor)—to feel this contact, I was willing to defy the other boys, refuse to say uncle , or say it and recant. Now I spent so much time on this harsh exchange, where I was selling myself for free but still could never find enough takers, where the buyers I despised despised the merchandise I’d become, that all other human reciprocities (between friends, teacher and student, parent and child) appeared excessively kind, extraordinarily considerate.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The wolf in me trotted away from the campfire, threw back a finely modeled head, and howled—but the sheep went to O’Reilly, because I didn’t know how to say no. Taken out of his office and spirited here, O’Reilly looked crazy and ill—puffy, disordered, breathing laboriously, reeking of bourbon. I was ashamed of him. Over the next few weeks, Annie stopped eating. She’d got it into her head that William had found her repulsively fat, and she’d spit with scorn at the reflection in the mirror of her meager breasts and nearly fleshless hips. She longed for the purity of a boy’s body (a boy before puberty). She’d found another girl at school with the same obsessions. They slept all day, prided themselves on their luminous paleness, grew their hair very long. They wrote poetry and began to go to cocktail parties with professors; they were invited by a teaching fellow in art history whom they’d befriended. At midnight they’d get together in Annie’s dorm room, light candles, and take several hours to eat two cucumbers. The rest of the time they lived on vodka, cigarettes, and black tea. O’Reilly hospitalized Annie for not eating, but she tore the intravenous tubes out of her arms and trotted frantically up and down the stairs to work off the disfiguring calories. I took her home to my father’s for Christmas. My stepmother gave us a tour of the house, as Midwesterners will do. We looked at cedar closets, the linen cupboard with enough sheets to outfit an infirmary, the whole cooked turkey and cold ham waiting in the fridge for our midnight snacks. We inspected the basement, saw the furnace, the bar locked tight against pilfering maids, the Ping-Pong table. “If you kids feel in the mood for a game,” Dad said, “even in the middle of the night, go right ahead since it’s soundproof down here.” “Anyway, you’ll be up,” my stepmother said to my father sourly. She launched into a recital of his annoying nocturnal habits. “He doesn’t get up till late afternoon, and at six in the evening he sits down to a breakfast of a pound of bacon. I’ve had to go my own way. Otherwise I’d never have had a life.” Which was my father’s cue to brag about his wife’s social successes as chief Friend to the Symphony, as docent at the art museum, and as the star of Mr. Feltrinelli’s painting class. She said, “I did a portrait of your dad as a sad clown and then a sort of Michigan landscape that got out of hand so I made it abstract but it’s kinda cute anyway.” She was also going to play Scrooge in a Christmas production for the Home for the Incurables (“If only I can get my lines down. Will you help, Annie? I’ve got a wonderful costume and beard and bah-humbug all worked out”).

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  33 Women were often the butt of sexist jokes, much to Murray’s dismay, and as the only woman in her class and in the entire student body (the other female student had dropped out), Murray was routinely excluded from class discussions—not because professors “deliberately ignored” her, but because “their freewheeling classroom style of informal discussion allowed the men’s deeper voices to obliterate [her] lighter voice.” 34 This alleged obliteration of voice, coupled with the assumption that Murray “had nothing to contribute,” left her feeling “condemned to silence.” 35 The use of the term obliterate might have been hyperbolic on Murray’s part, given her reputation for aggressive questioning and her willingness to confront male opponents, but her sense of her experience there attests to the ways in which her masculine-of-center gender performance was summarily rejected.

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  It’s natural and understandable to get defensive when someone is angry with you. In fact, it would be weird not to want to defend yourself in such situations. It would really run contrary to our nature. That said, this is clearly one of those cases where identifying your goals is critical to your success. It’s also contextual, meaning there are a number of complicated relationship factors at play (such as, is this person a supervisor or can they otherwise harm your career progression?). In the end, to navigate such a moment, you need to think about what you want to get out of this situation. Do you want to repair the relationship, solve the problem you created, let them know they shouldn’t communicate in such a hostile way, or maybe all of those things? Once again, we find that taking a moment to think through our goals is necessary to navigating these situations successfully. At Home One type of situation where this drive for revenge is particularly complicated is with parents and their children. Few parents would use the word “revenge” to describe their parenting approach, but listening to the way parents talk about their use of punishment often reveals justice-related motivations rather than educational or developmental motivations. When I have talked to parents about their use of punishments, including physical punishments like spanking, they often offer explanations that sound an awful lot like revenge. Parents routinely say things to me like, “Well they deserved a punishment” or even that their kids “had it coming.” Frankly, a number of people have told me that they were spanked as children because they “deserved it.”* Yet this line of thinking doesn’t typically get parents what they want, which is to curb the problematic behavior. Take, for instance, a situation where a child gets angry at a sibling and expresses that anger in the way many young children do, by hitting. Parents routinely respond to this sort of behavior through a combination of scolding, punishment, or even spanking † (often using the justice/revenge rationale to support it). Instead, parents should pause to think about their desired outcome. What do you really want in this moment? Usually,

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  When I started to enter him, he said “Jesus Christ” out loud and grimaced with pain. The closest roommate stirred. I pulled out and he dashed for the toilet. I followed him. He sat on the toilet, door open, and said in a loud voice, “You’re really a pain in the ass,” and smiled that big unveiled smile. I stood there while he winced and talked and looked down into the toilet to see if anything had come out. His body had been tanned so often it retained a permanent swimsuit line. We didn’t go back to bed, neither then nor ever, but the next semester I had a room of my own in a boardinghouse and Mick would borrow it every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon when I was in class. He used it as a place where he could sleep with his girlfriend. Once I found a single drop of blood on my sheets. Often I could smell the scent of his clean but athletic and unperfumed body. By that time he’d been teased so much for his smile—and had even had a caricature drawn in which he was all teeth—that he’d lost his naturalness. The next year he dropped out of school and joined the paratroopers. Two days after the bachelor dinner, William Everett Hunton called me at three in the afternoon and begged me to hurry over to the law quad. When I arrived, there was Annie slumped outside his door, barefoot, wearing a pretty rose silk slip and nothing else, her beehive collapsed. She looked up at me with huge muddy eyes, but the clinch of recognition quickly relaxed and she glanced away, hopeless. “For God’s sake, Annie, get up!” I shouted, as concerned about the scandal she was making as the pain she was suffering. The minute I spoke, the door flew open and framed William. “Thank heavens you’ve come.” He looked with fear and loathing at Annie. “I see you’ve met my little doggie. Don’t pet her. We’re leaving her out here to punish her. She barked all night. You can call her Sam.” He yanked me into the room, after I caught a glimpse of a mad grin on Annie’s face at the name Sam. She even mouthed it silently. And then her mouth turned from comic to tragic, and her eyes filled with tears. As soon as he’d closed the door he leaned up against it, as though to keep Sam out. “Oh, my dear, you’d never guess the cheap paperback I’ve made of my life, pure roman de gare—why wasn’t I content to stay a thoughtless queen in quest of big dicks? This GF (by which I mean ‘genital female’ to distinguish her from us, darling, who are women by choice, not by necessity, though in your case I do see the iron hand of fate)—this GF has been turning my life into hell. I haven’t been to class for a week and, listen!” We stood stock still.