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 The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I WAS SITTING IN a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. … Mom's gestures were all familiar—the way she tilted her head and thrust out her lower lip when studying items of potential value that she'd hoisted out of the Dumpster, the way her eyes widened with childish glee when she found something she liked. Her long hair was streaked with gray, tangled and matted, and her eyes had sunk deep into their sockets, but still she reminded me of the mom she'd been when I was a kid, swan-diving off cliffs and painting in the desert and reading Shakespeare aloud. … It had been months since I laid eyes on Mom, and when she looked up, I was overcome with panic that she'd see me and call out my name, and that someone on the way to the same party would spot us together and Mom would introduce herself and my secret would be out. I slid down in the seat and asked the driver to turn around and take me home to Park Avenue.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  The rates of pain among women, she added, shoot up to 70 percent when anal sex is included. Until recently, anal sex was a relatively rare practice among young adults. But as it’s become disproportionately common in porn—and the big payoff in R-rated fare such as Kingsman and The To Do List—it’s also on the rise in real life. In 1992 only 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they had tried anal sex. Today 20 percent of women eighteen to nineteen have, and by ages twenty to twenty-four it’s up to 40 percent. A 2014 study of heterosexuals sixteen to eighteen years old—and can we pause for a moment to consider just how young that is?—found that it was mainly boys who pushed for “fifth base,” approaching it less as a form of intimacy with a partner (who they assumed would both need to be and could be coerced into it) than a competition with other boys. Girls were expected to endure the act, which they consistently reported as painful. Both sexes blamed that discomfort on the girls themselves, for being “naïve or flawed,” unable to “relax.” Deborah Tolman has bluntly called anal “the new oral.” “Since all girls are now presumed to have oral sex in their repertoire,” she said, “anal sex is becoming the new ‘Will she do it or not?’ behavior, the new ‘Prove you love me.’” And still, she added, “girls’ sexual pleasure is not part of the equation.” According to Herbenick, the rise of anal sex places new pressures on young women to perform or else be labeled a prude. “It’s a metaphor, a symbol in one concrete behavior for the lack of education about sex, the normalization of female pain, and the way what had once been stigmatized has, over the course of a decade, become expected. If you don’t want to do it you’re suddenly not good enough, you’re frigid, you’re missing out, you’re not exploring your sexuality, you’re not adventurous.” I recalled a conversation I’d had with Lily, the girl who was exasperated by her high school boyfriend’s preoccupation with intercourse. He watched a lot of porn, too, she’d said, and was particularly game to try anal sex. She complied mostly because she wanted to please him. “The first time, we had to stop right away because I hated it,” she said. “Later, he pressured me to do it again; he said that we hadn’t actually done it before, since it was so short. At that point I guess I did it out of stubbornness. Like, Okay, fine. I’ll do it again and I still won’t like it.” She laughed. “Which clearly isn’t very healthy.”

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  A beautiful young woman at the office to whom I’d confided the secret of my sexuality (she’d sworn never to betray my confidence) looked at me now with compassion during coffee breaks, held my hand, and treated me as though I had leukemia. From her scattered remarks I grasped that she thought homosexuality was a sadness, a wound, more a poetic disposition than a perverse activity. What would she have thought if she’d seen me on my knees in a subterranean slice of jungle inserted under the leafless, treeless forest of gray Manhattan? During lunch hour, in the cruisy toilet at the old Whitney Museum (when it was still next door to the Modern), I saw a painting student I’d met at the Eton art academy. He frowned at me and said, “I scarcely recognized you, you’ve become so fat—what a shame to ruin your looks when you’re still so young. How old are you?” “Twenty-three.” “Well, you look horrible, at least thirty; you should enjoy what’s left of your youth.” A week later I mentioned to Maria that my new suit bought on time from Rogers Peet must be made of an inferior fabric since it was already wearing thin just below my crotch. “That’s because you’ve gotten so chubby, Dumpling, that your legs rub together when you walk.” Until now I’d always eaten just as much as I liked whenever it suited me and I’d always been slender. Although I’d hated gym class and gladly avoided exercise, normal campus comings and goings had sufficed to burn off the huge quantities of food I devoured. Of course, at my fraternity house we’d been given roast beef; now I was too poor to eat anything but spaghetti. The calamity of having gone to fat shocked me, first because I hadn’t noticed it, second because it seemed irreversible. I couldn’t imagine dieting. A grim fatalism settled over me that was too anxious to be called resignation. Every morning I’d stand on the toilet to inspect my body in the only mirror in the apartment, the tiny one above the sink, but I could never tell if I was thinner or fatter. I refused to buy a scale and enter the realm of fact; I preferred to conjure my fictions, bloat in despair, dwindle in joy, stay constant to that mild anxiety Freud had termed “boredom.” And then there was something stubborn in me that didn’t want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right man came along, he’d be able to see my virtues magically. Once he kissed me, the frog would turn into a prince. I had become a trick question, a heavy disguise, but behind the disobliging exterior was the welcoming child I would always be. Of course, what I’d forgotten was that a lover was not Parsifal and I was not the Grail; the medievalism of my imagination was not sufficiently up-to-date to recognize that the lover was a shopper and I a product.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  If I argued a point, I was being over-intellectual (a sin I’d already become aware of from the painters and which Dr. O’Reilly considered the most serious impediment to my mental health). The mind as its own enemy. The mind desperate to outwit itself. The mind claiming virtue but intent on preserving its own viciousness. The mind a boat at sea rebuilding itself while under sail. The mind a rotting meat under expensive spices. The mind a pure spirit (the unsuspecting wife) under the sway of a murderous will (Bluebeard). Perhaps that’s why Buddhism appealed to me. It denied the existence of the soul, the will, and even the self and sought to show that only illusion lends a spurious unity and dynamism to so many separate, detachable sentiments. For me, Buddhism was the welcome prediction of cosmic collapse, spiritual entropy. What I desired most was a man; desiring men was sick; therefore, to become well I must kill desire itself. “Or kill men!” O’Reilly shouted, triumphant, half rising from his chair behind the analytic couch where he usually dozed out of sight or bit his broad white mustache and fiddled with his drink. “You want to murder men! You see, old boy, you think I’m sleeping, that I’m counter-transferent, but even when I’m dozing I’m listening, putting the pieces together in the preconscious, creative part of my brain. You want to murder men by sleeping with them. The stiff cock is the torero’s sword. There’s a lot of bullfighting imagery here.” Any reference to my own penis embarrassed me; moreover, I was reluctant to explain that my penis played little or no part under the partition. I had no desire (no vulgar desire I might have said) to obtain sexual release. In my eyes, my preference for service to others over personal pleasure mitigated my corrupt desires. Annie Schroeder was also a student at my school. I gave her a ride the fifty miles back to our campus. She told me she planned to be a model. I wondered out loud if she’d photograph differently than she looked. “Do you think I’m fat ?” She poured scorn into the word. “On the contrary.” “I suppose O’Reilly’s instructed you to say that. Don’t play dumb. I know he thinks I have an eating disorder. But if so, I’m not like all those little Jewish girls at school fretting over their waistlines. I have a real reason to obsess over food.” “Oh?” I had the sensation I was giving a lift to a fire. And yes, her hair was red, twisted around her head in a beehive too old for her thin young face, the face of a soldier wearing a bloody bandage. “Didn’t O’Reilly tell you?” She looked at me searchingly. I took my eyes off the slippery road to look into hers, outlined in kohl, her lips painted almost black, her face a long slice of Persian melon. “Tell me what?” I asked guiltily.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  My university had twenty thousand students, which makes a big school but a small town. Despite the smallness, I was able to keep several different lives separate from one another—I hid the Chinese from my fraternity brothers, the brothers from the bohemians I was mingling with in the middle room of the student-union cafeteria, and all three from those hairy legs and hard penises I was meeting under cold thick marble partitions or thin metal ones. When Kay or Betty would flirt with me I’d blush, and that became a new joke with them: I was nicknamed “Your Holiness” and teased for being a puritan. “We’ve heard about the American puritans,” Kay said unsmilingly. “Thoreau,” she said, pronouncing the name as though she meant the Hebrew holy book, the Torah. Since I’d read so many books about heterosexual sex and was specially well informed about the mysteries of the clitoris, my frat brothers thought I was a secret cocksman. Their stories were all about getting so drunk they were sick on their dates; girls were seen as good sports who held their heads over toilets and murmured, “It’ll be okay, honey.” The fraternity house was an Edwardian mansion. The outside was crosshatched by dingy timber on cream stucco like an old tic-tac-toe game. The fraternity was famous in the South for drinking, football, and racism; here in the North, we’d retained the drinking. Two or three of our members were jocks, but no one paid them much attention. As for the racism, we’d start quaking with laughter whenever we had to put on hoods with Halloween eyeslits for our secret ceremonies and pledge to protect white womanhood. There were at least three Negro star football players the brothers would have pledged if the bylaws had permitted them to do so, but this whoring after gladiators seemed to me only another form of racism. Our swords, the flowery Masonic language, and the Klannish sentiments would make our president scratch his head. He was a hawk-nosed man who liked to sleep and drink, always seemed to be genially confused, and appeared to be freshly hatched or peeled, certainly minus a vital protective layer. “Come on, guys,” he’d say, sheepishly holding his sword aloft, “show some respect.” “Let’s skip it and have some brews,” the vice-president would suggest, and soon we’d all be sitting around the chapel-size dining room in our fancy dress, drinking beers in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. We never even succeeded in making a float for Homecoming, though we bought the chicken wire and crepe paper.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  [image file=image_rsrc1CB.jpg] For a year I lived as a fat man. Sometimes I’d be picked up by an older man or a black man. Both categories seemed more indulgent than the white guys my age, who struggled to be as thin and boyish as possible and who saw only each other. Once an attractive couple picked me up. They wanted me to take turns servicing them as they embraced. I felt like a home appliance one seldom buys but rents when needed, something like a rug shampooer. Yet I was disappointed when they failed to invite me back. When depressed after a long fruitless search, I’d buy a midnight sack of groceries at the deli: English muffins, chocolate bars (the big expensive European kind), pepperoni, donuts, and I’d head guiltily home. In November Lou took me in hand. He sent me to a diet doctor who saw me once a week and prescribed steak, salad, white wine, and amphetamines. In those days students might take a Dexedrine to pull an all-nighter, but the drug was little used, although Dr. O’Reilly had of course sworn by it. The weight melted off me. In eight weeks I lost forty pounds and became slender. At the same time Lou insisted I start coming with him to the gym. As a teenager I’d been hit in the head by a baseball; I was always the only one to get vertigo when climbing a rope and a severe burn when sliding down it; I was a perpetual malingerer, despite regularly falling in love with my gym teacher. Now I became nauseated after doing just a few leg lifts and had to sit with my head between my knees. The locker room sent me into a fit of shyness.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  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. He didn’t go to museums or read highbrow books, at least not systematically; he wasn’t interested in improving his mind or coming off as cultured. He did prize his taste, and that he imposed tyrannically on those few people he liked.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  before evening. Since he was supposed to eat six small meals a day, after he toyed with one, he’d order a second, ignoring both. I showed him a story I was working on, which I hoped to sell to Esquire or The New Yorker for a great deal of money, which would free me of my parents. “But your prose is so mindless,” Lou said. “As in this sentence, when you say, ‘I had no thought in my head,’ I mean, you don’t stop to think at all, do you, Bunny, you just babble. And then the way you dote on your characters. I can’t bear that sort of doting. And this chandelier. The only reason you bother to put it in the story is so that it can come crashing down at the end, which is an absurdly cheap touch. But the worst is the doting, this lip-smacking satisfaction you take in all these dreadful middle-class bores with their problems, as though having a problem were an automatic bid for sympathy instead of an invitation to impatience or contempt.” His words stung me. Every criticism seemed irrefutable if previously unsuspected. It was true I loved my characters, to whom I’d distributed the various voices and vices of my friends. It was true I wrote in a trance and never revised; my mother had told me I was a genius. A genius doesn’t grope, learn, rework, or even work. And it was true I wrote to be adored—by my mother first of all, and then by Lou or whomever I was with. Yes, I wanted fame, and when the heat of vision, fired by Drambuie, was on me in my white room, I felt I was already famous. But there was another reason to write: to redeem the sin of my life by turning it into the virtue of art. Until now, I’d showed my stories only to appreciative readers. Other young writers would ply me with compliments and in exchange I’d praise their work. The usual inspiration for my fiction was the “powerful” television drama with its cozy view of character, its melodramatic plot, and its message. To show that this was literature, however, one threw in a symbol or two, preferably something from the Passion of Christ, and a poetic haze of phrase condensed from our best Southern writers. An epiphany was clapped on to lots and lots of hard-hitting dialogue, which was easy to write, although one pretended otherwise. The characters were all suitably defeated and sensitive. Lou had too refined an ear and too great a horror of the obvious to like my inflated playlets. He was also too unhappy and anxious to take an interest in other people’s lives. He ended up with a small canon of books about himself—John Rechy’s City of Night, which was just appearing chapter by chapter in magazines, the few isolated scraps of William Burroughs he could find in print, Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers.

• 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 Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  24 “Therefore I will scatter you like drifting straw [Driven away] by the desert wind. 25 “This is your destiny, the portion [of judgment] measured to you From Me,” says the LORD , “Because you have forgotten Me And trusted in [pagan] lies [the counterfeit gods, and the pretense of alliance].” 26 “So I Myself will throw your skirts up over your face, That your shame may be exposed [publicly]. 27 “I have seen your vile and detestable acts, Even your adulteries and your lustful neighings [after idols], And the lewdness of your prostitution On the hills in the fields. Woe (judgment is coming) to you, O Jerusalem! How long will you remain unclean [by ignoring My precepts]?” Jeremiah 14 Drought and a Prayer for Mercy 1 T HE WORD of the LORD that came to Jeremiah concerning the drought: 2 “Judah mourns And her gates languish; Her people sit on the ground in mourning clothes And the cry of Jerusalem has gone up. 3 “Their nobles have sent their servants for water; They have come to the cisterns and found no water. They have returned with empty vessels; They have been shamed and humiliated, And they cover their heads. 4 “The ground is cracked Because there has been no rain on the land; The farmers are distressed, And they have covered their heads [in shame]. 5 “The doe in the field has given birth only to abandon her young Because there is no grass. 6 “And the wild donkeys stand on the barren heights; They pant for air like jackals, Their eyesight fails Because there is no grass. 7 “O LORD , though our many sins testify against us” [prays Jeremiah], “Act now [for us and] for Your name’s sake [so that the faithless may witness Your faithfulness]! For our backslidings are countless; We have sinned against You. 8 “O Hope of Israel, Her Savior in time of distress and trouble, Why should You be like a sojourner (temporary resident) in the land Or like a traveler who turns aside and spreads his tent to linger [only] for a night? 9 “Why should You be [hesitant and inactive] like a man astounded and perplexed, Like a mighty man unable to save? Yet You, O LORD , are among us, And we are called by Your name; Do not leave us!” 10 Thus says the LORD to this people [Judah], “In the manner and to the degree [already pointed out] they have loved to wander; they have not restrained their feet. Therefore the LORD does not accept them; He will now remember [in detail] their wickedness and punish them for their sins.” 11 So the LORD said to me, “Do not pray for good things for this people. 12 “Though they fast, I will not hear their cry; and though they offer burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them [because they are done as obligations, and not as acts of loving obedience].

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  And birds of every kind will live under it; they will nest [securely] in the shade of its branches. 24 “All the trees of the field will know that I the LORD bring down the tall tree, exalt the low tree, dry up the green tree, and make the dry tree flourish. I am the LORD ; I have spoken, and I will fulfill it.” Ezekiel 18 God Deals Justly with Individuals 1 T HE WORD of the LORD came to me again, saying, 2 “What do you mean by using this proverb concerning the land of Israel, ‘a The fathers eat sour grapes [they sin], But the children’s teeth are set on edge’? 3 “As I live,” says the Lord GOD , “you are certainly not going to use this proverb [as an excuse] in Israel anymore. 4 “Behold (pay close attention), all souls are Mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is Mine. The soul who sins will die. [Rom 6:23 ] 5 “But if a man is righteous (keeps the law) and practices justice and righteousness, 6 and does not eat [at the pagan shrines] on the mountains or raise his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, or defile his neighbor’s wife or approach a woman during her [monthly] time of impurity— 7 if a man does not oppress anyone, but restores to the debtor his pledge, does not commit robbery, but gives his bread to the hungry and covers the naked with clothing, 8 if he b does not charge interest or take a percentage of increase [on what he lends in compassion], if he keeps his hand from sin and executes true justice between man and man, 9 if he walks in My statutes and [keeps] My ordinances so as to act with integrity; [then] he is [truly] righteous and shall certainly live,” says the Lord GOD . [Ezek 20:11 ; Amos 5:4 ] 10 “If he is the father of a violent son who sheds blood, and who does any of these things to a brother 11 (though the father did not do any of these things), that is, the son even eats [the food set before idols] at the mountain shrines, and defiles his neighbor’s wife, 12 oppresses the poor and needy, commits robbery, does not restore [to the debtor] his pledge, but raises his eyes to the idols, and commits repulsive acts, 13 and charges interest and takes [a percentage of] increase on what he has loaned; will he then live? He will not live! He has done all these disgusting things, he shall surely be put to death; his blood will be on his own head.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  “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. “Look, doll,” he whispered, “people think a queen’s a hoot, but the life of the party goes home alone while everyone makes a last-ditch play for the idiot hood who’s been standing in the corner all night by himself. My dear, who did the lighting here? I should get my own light man written into my contracts just like Marlene. Nothing like a baby-pink follow spot to take years off a gal.” At twenty-two William was terrified of aging.

• 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)

  “I’m afraid you just put your dick in me, Bunny, wriggle around and kiss my neck, and shoot like a twelve-year-old,” Lou said, “which is sweet but ineffectual. You need to focus more on cock and ass, pull out farther and plunge deeper, balance your weight on your elbows and toes, that will give you better leverage, go slow. Do everything with deliberation.” I was terribly wounded. Until now I’d never had any anxiety about performance because I hadn’t realized I was on stage. Just as William had made me self-conscious about cock size, Lou made me so nervous about fucking that I kept losing my erection. By default I became the “boy” and occasionally Lou fucked me. Lou was fired from his advertising job, but he told me that happened every six months anyway in the biz. “Every time they lose a big account, they can the whole team. I want to write a book called Love You, Love Your Work, Gonna Hafta Let You Go .” Now that neither of us was working, we were free to go to the Oak Street beach every day or sometimes a mile or two farther north to some slabs of broken concrete, the Belmont Rocks, where the gay boys had staked a claim and which Lou called “Homo-lulu.” Now I knew the whole adolescent world I’d missed out on, the world of idle summer days, of tinny portable radios and coconut oil, of towel hopping and shared Cokes, of desultory exclamations (“Ow! That bug really bit me”) followed by wave-lulled silence and the indignant nursing of the glossy shoulder or silky thigh. Lou wrote a poem about cruising the Oak Street beach at night, but he felt the only good line was “the pollen-streaked lamplight.” Ezra Pound was his true Penelope, and even Pound’s criminal politics and weird economics Lou was able to justify when it suited his mood. For Lou, Pound was strategic in any dismissal of Eliot’s absurdly English posturing, and both men rose serenely above the local American battle between the Beats and Academics. Lou couldn’t be an Academic. His fear and hatred of schools forbade that, as well as his contempt for sterile exercises. But the Beats, despite their appealing cult of drugs and Whitmanian sincerity, lacked the cool elegance Lou venerated. The values he really embraced were those of Negro jazz musicians who divided the world into what was square and what was cool. Things labeled cool were highly controlled if sometimes arbitrary and decorative, an expression of a narrow range of feelings: happy-guy exuberance, cerebral noodling, or a foggy but anxious melancholy. Each of those few times Lou wanted to like someone over fifty, he repeated Pound’s phrase about “old men with beautiful manners.” Only twenty years later did I stumble across the line and realize Pound was mocking the statesmen who brought on World War I.

• 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)

  Just two urinals away from him in a line of eight was a beefy businessman, obvious toupee, out of breath. In the stalls a scurrying and the clank of belt buckle against metal partition. I chose my urinal, the farthest one away, and I too looked down. The silence was intense, intensified by the timed flush of water. Then silence again, the throb of my pulse in my neck, the businessman’s impatient, audible exhalation, the scratch of a match in a stall and soon the rich scent of burning tobacco creeping out over the ammonia smell of disinfectant. The concentration was strong and focused, every heart pounding, every sense open. When it became obvious that I, too, was waiting and no longer pissing, the businessman shot his shiny black mohair cuff and consulted his massive gold wristwatch. Face burning, fingers going cold on my cock, I turned to look at the businessman. He regarded me expressionlessly, leaned his head back hoping to glimpse into my urinal, took a step away from the wall to expose his short, engorged, nearly purple penis. I stepped back to show mine, though I knew he didn’t want me, just as a sign that I was a friendly player in the game. In a flash he was squatting, the student turned to feed the businessman’s mouth, the smoker in the stall dropped his cigarette in the water, quick hiss, and he and his neighbor in the next stall were on their knees, hands reaching under the partition between them and grabbing each other, as I could see by stooping over. No one cared about me one way or the other. I was one of them. I looked at the student being sucked. His soft white belly with its explosion of black hair and wet cock shiny as glass were flashed on the screen of my mind as was that rush of male hands under the partition. I listened to the quick clink-clink of a belt buckle on the tiles. Then the muffled sound of an approaching step, followed by someone pushing open the door, released the echoing chatter in the corridor. Instantly the couple in the stalls regained their seats; the businessman and his client broke off their deal; and I revolved to face my urinal. The intruder, a big, pigeon- toed athlete, splashed, dribbled, left, but not before he’d made us feel like Sleeping Beauty’s courtiers the moment before the prince melts the rime of sleep. ... If I use that implausible image I do so to cool my burning face, since the athlete, after buttoning up, flicked his hair out of his eyes and voiced a simple grunt of disgust. Home to Chicago for Thanksgiving weekend, I managed to slip away for a wild evening with Morris, the clerk in Tex’s store. Tex had disappeared but had left a note promising to come back with money. Morris opened the store only when it suited him.