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 Naked Lunch (1959)

  Old moth-eaten tigress shit sure turn into a fag eater.... So this citizen, being an arty and crafty fag, begins making costume jewelry and jewelry sets. Every rich old gash in Greater New York wants he should do her sets, and he is making money, 21, El Morocco, Stork, but no time for sex, and all the time worrying about his rep..., He begins playing the horses, supposed to be something manly about gambling God knows why, and he figures it will build him up to be seen at the track. Not many fags play the horses, and those that play lose more than the others, they are lousy gamblers plunge in a losing streak and hedge when they win... which being the pattern of their lives.... Now every child knows there is one law of gambling: winning and losing come in streaks. Plunge when you win, fold when you lose. (I once knew a fag dip into the till -- not the whole two thousand at once on the nose win or Sing Sing. Not our Gertie... Oh no a deuce at a time...) "So he loses and loses and lose some more. One day he is about to put a rock in a set when the obvious occur. 'Of course, I'll replace it later.' Famous last words. So all that winter, one after the other, the diamonds, emeralds, pearls, rubies and star sapphires of the haut monde go in hock and replaced by queer replicas.... "So the opening night of the Met this old hag appear as she thinks resplendent in her diamond tiara. So this other old whore approach and say, 'Oh, Miggles, you're so smart... to leave the real ones at home.... I mean we're simply mad to go around tempting fate.' " 'You're mistaken, my dear. These are real.' " 'Oh but Miggles dahling, they're not.... I mean ask your jeweler.... Well just ask anybody . Haaaaaa.' "So a Sabbath is hastily called. (Lucy Bradshinkel, look to thy emeralds. ) All these old witches examining their rocks like a citizen find leprosy on himself. " 'My chicken blood ruby!' " 'My black oopalls!' Old bitch marry so many times so many gooks and spics she don't know her accent from her ass.... " 'My stah sahphire!' shriek a poule de luxe . 'Oh it's all so awfull' " 'I mean they are strictly from Woolworth's....' " 'There's only one thing to do. I'm going to call the police,' says a strong-minded, outspoken old thing; and she clump across the floor on her low heels and calls the fuzz." "Well, the faggot draws a deuce; and in the box he meets this cat who is some species of cheap hustler, and love sets in or at least a facsimile thereof convince the parties inna first and second parts.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Manuel, the brilliant saucier at your two-star restaurant, puts on his best suit, combs his hair, dresses up his family in their Sunday best, and tries to get a table at the one-star place across the street. The aspiring actor/model/part-time maitre d' will break out in a flop sweat, trying to figure out where to hide him—if "La Migra" hasn't already grabbed him on the way to dinner. There is no deception more hypocritical, more nauseating, more willfully self- deluding than the industry-approved image of "the chef." We all know who is doing the heavy lifting, who's making that nice risotto with white truffles and porcini mushrooms, the pan-seared hamachi with sauce vierge, the ravioli of beef cheeks with sage and sauce madere . . . We know, to our eternal shame, who is more likely to show up every day, dig in, do the right thing, cook conscientiously, endure without complaint: our perennially unrecognized coworkers from Mexico, Ecuador, and points south. The ones you don't see hurling around catchphrases on the TV Food Network, or grinning witlessly at the camera after the latest freebie for the Beard House. What is the heart of the matter? The answer to this simple question: When was the last time you saw an American dishwasher? And if you saw one—would you hire him? If you're like me, probably not. The best cooks are ex-dishwashers. Hell, the best people are ex-dishwashers. Because who do you want in your kitchen, when push comes to shove, and you're in danger of falling in the weeds and the orders are pouring in and the number-one oven just went down and the host just sat a twelve-top and there's a bad case of the flu that's been tearing through the staff like the Vandals through Rome? Do you want an educated, CIA-trained American know-it-all like I was early in my career? A guy who's going to sulk if you speak harshly to him? A guy who's certain there's a job waiting for him somewhere else ("Maybe . . . like Aspen, man . . . or the Keys . . . I can cook and maybe hit the slopes on my days off, or the beach")? Or some resume-building aspiring chef ("Yeah, dude . . . I'm thinking of like leaving here next month . . . maybe going to do a stage with Thomas Keller or Dean Fearing... He rocks. . .

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [21] The (so far, incomplete) nemesis of Bash Camps was John Smyth, as charismatic as Peter Ball but in a completely different mould as a successful Evangelical lawyer: the conservative Methodist Mrs Mary Whitehouse was among his clients when her moral campaigns reached the law courts. An extrovert family man with easy access to certain public schools, Smyth rose to be chairman of the Iwerne Trust (the sponsor of the ‘Bash Camps’), as well as a trustee of the closely related Scripture Union. Once in contact with schoolboys, he would select some for grooming and work out his own moral chaos on them, particularly through repeated sessions of flagellation, which in some cases he continued into their life after schooldays. Gradually evidence of Smyth’s crimes began to emerge; he was nevertheless not reported to the police, but simply forced to step back from his positions of responsibility, and in 1984 he emigrated to southern Africa. There his pattern of offending continued, including the unexplained death of a young man in Zimbabwe. He himself died in South Africa before he could face trial. At the time of writing, Anglican conservative Evangelical leaders have failed to face up adequately to what happened, nor have they fully addressed the implications of other analogous behaviour in the same circle. One response has been a rebranding exercise, in which the Iwerne Trust has become the Titus Trust. [22] WEAPONIZING

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Amid Mark’s general lack of comment on Jesus’s parentage, there is one remarkable moment where he ventriloquizes the people of Jesus’s home town as offensively calling Jesus ‘the son of Mary’ as well as brother of James, Joseph, Simon and Judas. This phrase ‘son of Mary’ would normally indicate that the addressee’s father was unknown. Matthew, Luke and an echo of the story in John all briskly alter the alarming usage to highlight Joseph, only Matthew keeping any reference at all to Mary; but Matthew and Luke then provide two different accounts of the circumstances of Jesus’s birth in their Infancy Narratives. [8] In Matthew, Joseph is the main actor, and in Luke, Mary. Matthew tells the story of Joseph’s initial horror at Mary’s pregnancy; he has to be instructed by an angel in a dream not to follow his instinct to repudiate his young betrothed, for this child is the Messiah (Matt. 1.18–22). Matthew, of all the Gospel writers, is the most concerned to link Jesus’s ministry to the Judaic past, and his narrative here is in dialogue with the terms of Judaic law in Deuteronomy (Deut. 22.20–29), which discusses what should happen when a betrothed virgin is seduced or raped. The penalty in Deuteronomy is execution by stoning: kindly Joseph instead resolves to end the betrothal quietly, even before the angelic intervention. Luke seems more indirect than Matthew, but when in his story the angel Gabriel tells Mary of her pregnancy, she immediately asks him how that can be, since she has no husband (Luke 1.34). In fact, Luke goes much further than Matthew. Among the songs he incorporates into his Infancy Narratives are two hymns of victory, still commonly used in the various Christian regular daily rounds of worship called ‘Offices’. One is attributed to John the Baptist’s father Zacharias (the canticle ‘Benedictus’ used for instance in Anglican Morning Prayer), and the other to Mary herself (the ‘Magnificat’ of Anglican Evensong). Not all their content is relevant to their present context, and it has been plausibly suggested that they are martial songs borrowed from the Maccabean period more than a century before, but their general message of renewal and the overthrow of existing power suits Luke’s purpose. [9] Significant therefore is Mary’s proclamation in the Magnificat that God ‘has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden ’ (Luke 1.48). Those Revised Standard Version translations underplay the shock value of these words to their early Christian readers. ‘Low estate’ renders tapeinōsis , which in its many shades of meaning stretches to ‘humiliation’, ‘disgrace’ or ‘baseness’: ‘handmaiden’ hardly hits the essence of doulē , which starkly means ‘female slave’, and which would therefore immediately suggest someone available for the humiliation of sexual assault. It was thus perfectly appropriate for Jane Schaberg to suggest the possibility that, in his use of this vocabulary, Luke is portraying Mary as the victim of rape.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Across the Catholic world, the outwardly celibate, claustrophobically single-sex world of the clergy had become a haven for gay men terrified of their sexuality: a ready-made alibi with the bonus of traditional prestige. In the absence of any moral code to make sense of their contradictions, their activities were liable to be full of self-hatred and devoid of anything resembling a moral compass. [16] Trujillo’s story is put in the shade by Pope John Paul’s protégé, the priest Marcial Maciel Degollado, who had grown up while Mexico was riven by violent confrontation between an anti-clerical government and defiant popular Catholicism; he was the founder of the militantly proselytizing and fervently orthodox Legion of Christ, which spread far beyond his native country. Persistent accusations of Maciel’s sexual abuse, ranging from paedophilia to adult sexual assault to the fathering of children, were ignored in Rome up to the very end of John Paul II’s long pontificate. Not so under his successor Benedict

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  XVI, who as Cardinal Josef Ratzinger and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the former Roman Inquisition) had done his best to rein in Pope John Paul’s wilder theological impulses. In May 2006 a statement about Maciel was issued on behalf of Benedict’s own successor as Prefect, that the Church had decided ‘taking account of the advanced age of the Reverend Maciel and his delicate health – to renounce any canonical process and to invite the Father to a reserved life of prayer and penance, renouncing every public ministry’. That was the extent of any action against Maciel before his death in 2008. [17] At last the Vatican was showing signs of taking the abuse problem seriously, but the damage had been done, and Benedict’s sense of its daunting scale was one factor in his unanticipated resignation in 2013. The wider world was losing its patience. The crisis was larger than sexual abuse; it was a general abuse of clerical power and prestige by damaged or frightened personalities among the clergy, particularly in covering up abuse where it was unearthed. Certain states founded on their Catholic identity, such as the Canadian province of Quebec or the Kingdom of Belgium, saw church attendance plummet, but nowhere has the reaction been more extreme than in the Irish Republic. The tipping point came in the 1990s when certain prominent priests, notably the extrovert Bishop of Galway Eamonn Casey, were revealed as having clandestine female partners and children. Back in Archbishop McQuaid’s days, ‘everyone knew…and at the same time they managed not to know’ about ecclesiastical misuse of power; now the revelations poured out in increasing detail. [18] Particularly devastating was the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes published by the Irish government in 2020, which included details of archaeological work on the site of a sewage tank containing the remains of illegitimate babies from a Catholic-run children’s home in Tuam. On cherished shibboleths in the Vatican I construction of a Catholic family, the Irish population and its representatives in the Dáil (Parliament) now repeatedly exercised their right of rejection, despite strong attempts from the Church authorities to influence the votes. In 1993 male homosexual practice ceased to be illegal; in 1995 a referendum approved divorce (a result which was now backed by all the Republic’s political leaders); in 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to introduce equal marriage for same-sex couples by popular vote; and in 2018 a decisive two-to-one referendum vote led to an end on the ban on abortion. Already in 2011, the Republic had pointedly closed its embassy in the Vatican, while Archbishop McQuaid’s posthumous reaction to an openly gay man becoming Taoiseach (Prime Minister) in 2017 is not recorded.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  necessary disclosure, I was involved in the early stages of GCM’s development. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12 13 . This mordant coinage of the Anglo-Catholic socialist priest Fr Kenneth Leech began differently ordered, as ‘lace, gin and backbiting’, in Leech’s letter to the Catholic Standard (Nov. 1975), 3, then reported in the Church Times , 12 Dec. 1975. Popular usage gave it the more punchy formulation; see K. Leech, ‘Beyond gin and lace: homosexuality and the Anglo-Catholic subculture’, in Speaking Love’s Name: Homosexuality: some Catholic and socialist reflections , Jubilee Group Pamphlets (London, 1988), 16–27, at 16. Matthew Bemand-Qureshi helped me excavate this intellectual genealogy. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13 14 . See W. Whyte, ‘OutRage! Hypocrisy, episcopacy, and homosexuality in England, 1968–1995’, in K. Cubitt (ed.), The Church and Hypocrisy , Studies in Church History 60 (forthcoming). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14 15 . J. Cornwell, The Pope in Winter: The dark face of John Paul II’s papacy (London, 2004), 234–46. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15 16 . F. Martel, In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, homosexuality, hypocrisy (London, 2019), 279–97, and 82, 123. For a summary discussion of the whole problem against a long-term background, see J. Cornwell, The Dark Box: A secret history of confession (London, 2014), ch. 10. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16 17 . Vatican Press Office statement, 19 May 2006: clumsily translated from the Italian http://nationalcatholicreporter.org/update/maciel_communique.pdf (accessed 19 Dec. 2023). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17 18 . A phrase of the novelist John Banville, reviewing O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves , Times Literary Supplement , 17 Dec. 2021, 3–4. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18 19 . Fuller, ‘Catholicism in 20th-century Ireland’, 497, 504, 507; C. Gribben, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland (Oxford, 2021), 205–6. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19 20 . While there is as yet no monograph on the Ball affair, a devastating account of his activities is provided by Dame Moira Gibb’s independent report, ‘An abuse of faith’, commissioned by the Church of England: churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-11/the-independent-peter-ball-review.pdf (accessed 11 Jan. 2024). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20 21 . A scathing newspaper article on the Bash Camp atmosphere from a female Evangelical insider and first-hand witness is A. Atkins, ‘Inside the sexual apartheid of John Smyth’s summer camps’, Daily Telegraph , 3 Feb. 2017. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21 22 . Currently the best way of following the story is the Independent Report, J. Pickles and G. Woods, Review into the Abuse by John Smyth of Pupils and Former Pupils of Winchester College (Winchester, 2021), commissioned by the College and published with admirable honesty on the internet: https://www.winchestercollege.org/assets/files/uploads/john-smyth-review-winchester-college-jan-2022- final.pdf (accessed 2 Dec. 2023). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22 23 . A sympathetic analysis of Johnston is A. Atherstone, ‘Christian family, Christian nation: Raymond Johnston and Nationwide Festival of Light in defence of the family’, in J. Doran, C. Methuen and A. Walsham (eds), Religion and the Household , Studies in Church History 50 (Woodbridge, 2014), 456–68.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Those who fell under Eastern skies or on their way to the East received the benefits of special indulgence for sins committed and were esteemed in the popular judgment as martyrs. John VIII., 872–882, pressed by the Saracens who were devastating Italy, had promised to soldiers fighting bravely against the pagans the rest of eternal life and, as far as it belonged to him to give it, absolution from sins.302 This precedent was followed by Urban II., who promised the first Crusaders marching to Jerusalem that the journey should be counted as a substitute for penance.303 Eugenius, 1146, went farther, in distinctly promising the reward of eternal life. The virtue of the reward was extended to the parents of those taking part in Crusades. Innocent III. included in the plenary indulgence those who built ships and contributed in any way, and promised to them "increase of eternal life." God, said the abbot Guibert, chronicler of the First Crusade, invented the Crusades as a new way for the laity to atone for their sins, and to merit salvation.304 The rewards were not confined to spiritual privileges. Eugenius III., in his exhortations to the Second Crusade, placed the Crusaders in the same category with clerics before the courts in the case of most offences.305 The kings of France, from 1188 to 1270 joined with the Holy See in granting to them temporal advantages, exemption from debt, freedom from taxation and the payment of interest. Complaint was frequently made by the kings of France that the Crusaders committed the most offensive crimes under cover of ecclesiastical protection. These complaints called forth from Innocent IV., 1246, and Alexander IV., 1260, instructions to the bishops not to protect such offenders. William of Tyre, in his account of the First Crusade, and probably reading into it some of the experiences of a later date, says (bk. I. 16), "Many took the cross to elude their creditors."306 If it is hard for us to unite the idea of war and bloodshed with the achievement of a purely religious purpose, it must be remembered that no such feeling prevailed in the Middle Ages. The wars of the period of Joshua and the Judges still formed a stimulating example. Chrysostom, Augustine, and other Church Fathers of the fifth century lifted up their voices against the violent destruction of heathen temples which went on in Egypt and Gaul; but whatever compunction might have been felt for the wanton slaying of Saracens by Christian armies in an attitude of aggression, the compunction was not felt when the Saracens placed themselves in the position of holding the sacred sites of Palestine.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He was the first to cast off the Jewish prejudices against the unclean heathen and to fraternize with the Gentile converts at Caesarea and at Antioch; and he was the first to withdraw from them in cowardly fear of the narrow-minded Judaizers from Jerusalem, for which inconsistency he had to submit to a humiliating rebuke of Paul.292 But Peter was as quick in returning to his right position as in turning away from it. He most sincerely loved the Lord from the start and had no rest nor peace till he found forgiveness. With all his weakness he was a noble, generous soul, and of the greatest service in the church. God overruled his very sins and inconsistencies for his humiliation and spiritual progress. And in his Epistles we find the mature result of the work of purification, a spirit most humble, meek, gentle, tender, loving, and lovely. Almost every word and incident in the gospel history connected with Peter left its impress upon his Epistles in the way of humble or thankful reminiscence and allusion. His new name, "Rock," appears simply as a "stone" among other living stones in the temple of God, built upon Christ, "the chief corner-stone."293 His charge to his fellow-presbyters is the same which Christ gave to him after the resurrection, that they should be faithful "shepherds of the flock" under Christ, the chief "shepherd and bishop of their souls."294 The record of his denial of Christ is as prominent in all the four Gospels, as Paul’s persecution of the church is in the Acts, and it is most prominent—as it would seem under his own direction—in the Gospel of his pupil and "interpreter" Mark, which alone mentions the two cock-crows, thus doubling the guilt of the denial,295 and which records Christ’s words of censure ("Satan"), but omits Christ’s praise ("Rock").296 Peter made as little effort to conceal his great sin, as Paul. It served as a thorn in his flesh, and the remembrance kept him near the cross; while his recovery from the fall was a standing proof of the power and mercy of Christ and a perpetual call to gratitude. To the Christian Church the double story of Peter’s denial and recovery has been ever since an unfailing source of warning and comfort. Having turned again to his Lord, who prayed for him that his personal faith fail not, he is still strengthening the brethren.297 As to his official position in the church, Peter stood from the beginning at the head of the Jewish apostles, not in a partisan sense, but in a large-hearted spirit of moderation and comprehension. He never was a narrow, contracted, exclusive sectarian.

• From The Girls (2016)

  The Ritz crackers, earnest groups crammed around bowls of watery ice. Talking SDS and comparing reading lists. I half shrugged, the barest shift of a shoulder. He seemed to understand this gesture for the falsehood it was. “Maybe I should write down my number for you,” Tom said. “It’s the hall phone, but you can just ask for me.” I could hear the stark billow of Suzanne’s laughter carrying in the air. “That’s okay,” I said. “There’s no phone here, anyway.” “They aren’t nice,” Tom said, catching my eyes. He looked like a rural preacher after a baptism, the wet pants clinging to his legs, his earnest stare. “What do you know?” I said, an alarming heat rising in my cheeks. “You don’t even know them.” Tom made an abortive gesture with his hands. “It’s a trash heap,” he said, sputtering, “can’t you see that?” He indicated the crumbling house, the tangle of overgrown vegetation. All the junked-out cars and oil drums and picnic blankets abandoned to the mold and the termites. I saw it all, but I didn’t absorb anything: I’d already hardened myself to him and there was nothing else to say. —Tom’s departure allowed the girls to deepen into their natures without the fracture of an outsider’s gaze. No more peaceful, sleepy chatter, no balmy stretches of easy silence. “Where’s your special friend?” Suzanne said. “Your old pal?” Her hollow affect, her leg jiggling even though her expression was blank. I tried to laugh like they did, but I didn’t know why I got unnerved at the thought of Tom returning to Berkeley. He was right about the junk in the yard, there was more of it, and maybe Nico really could have been hurt, and what then? I noticed all of them had gotten skinnier, not just Donna, a brittle quality to their hair, a dull drain behind the eyes. When they smiled, I glimpsed the coated tongues seen on the starving. Without consciously doing so, I pinned a lot of hope on Russell’s return. Wanting him to weigh down the flapping corners of my thoughts. “Heartbreaker,” Russell catcalled when he caught sight of me. “You run off all the time,” he said, “and it breaks our hearts when you leave us behind.” I tried to convince myself, seeing the familiarity of Russell’s face, that the ranch was the same, though when he hugged me, I saw something smeared at his jawline. It was his sideburns. They were not stippled, like hair, but flat. I looked closer. They were drawn on, I saw, with some kind of charcoal or eyeliner. The thought disturbed me; the perverseness, the fragility of the deception. Like a boy I’d known in Petaluma who shoplifted makeup to cover his pimples. Russell’s hand worked my neck, passing along a fritter of energy. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or not. And how immediately the group jolted to attention at his arrival, trooping in his wake like ragged ducklings.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Awake all night, as if my labored vigil would protect us, my hours of suffering a one-to-one offering. It seemed unbelievable that Tamar or my father didn’t notice how pale I was, how suddenly desperate for their company. They expected life would march on. Things had to be done, and I got shunted along their logistics with the numbness that had taken the place of whatever had made me Evie. My love of cinnamon hard candies, what I dreamed—that had all been exchanged for this new self, the changeling who nodded when spoken to and rinsed and dried the dinner plates, hands reddening in the hot water. I had to pack up my room at my mother’s house before I went to boarding school. My mother had ordered me the Catalina uniform—I found two navy skirts and a middy blouse folded on my bed, the fabric stinking of industrial cleaner, like rental tablecloths. I didn’t bother to try on the clothes, shoving them into a suitcase on top of tennis shoes. I didn’t know what else to pack, and it didn’t seem to matter. I stared at the room in a trance. All my once beloved things—a vinyl diary, a birthstone charm, a book of pencil drawings—seemed valueless and defunct, drained of an animating force. It was impossible to picture what type of girl would ever have liked those things. Ever worn a charm around her wrist or written accounts of her day. “You need a bigger suitcase?” my mother said from my doorway, startling me. Her face looked rumpled, and I could smell how much she’d been smoking. “You can take my red one, if you want.” I thought that she’d notice the change in me even if Tamar or my father couldn’t. The baby fat in my face disappeared, a hard scrape to my features. But she hadn’t mentioned anything. “This is fine,” I said. My mother paused, surveying my room. The mostly empty suitcase. “The uniform fits?” she asked. I hadn’t even tried it on, but I nodded, wrung into a new acquiescence. “Good, good.” When she smiled, her lips cracked and I was suddenly overcome. —I was shoving books into the closet when I found two milky Polaroids, hidden under a stack of old magazines. The sudden presence of Suzanne in my room: her hot feral smile, the pudge of her breasts. I could call up disgust for her, hopped up on Dexedrine and sweating from the effort of butchery, and at the same time be pulled in by a helpless drift—here was Suzanne. I should get rid of the photo, I knew, the image already charged with the guilty air of evidence. But I couldn’t. I turned the picture over, burying it in a book I’d never read again. The second photo was of the smeary back of someone’s head, turning away, and I stared at the image for a long moment before I realized the person was me.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Haw Haw! Can't let you choke at this rate -- I'd get a warning from the President. And what a disgrace if the dead wagon cart you out alive. My balls would drop off with the shame of it and I apprenticed myself to an experienced ox. One two three pull.' " The sail plane falls silent as erection, silent as greased glass broken by the young thief with oldwoman hands and cancelled eyes of junk.... In a noiseless explosion he penetrates the broken house, stepping over the greased crystals, a clock ticks loud in the kitchen, hot air ruffles his hair, his head disintegrates in a heavy duck load.... The Old Man flips out a red shell and pirouettes around his shotgun. "Aw, shucks, fellers, tweren't nothing.... Fish in the barrel.... Money in the bank ...roundheeled boy, one greased shot brain goose and he flop in an obscene position.... Can you hear me from where you are, boy? "I was young myself once and heard the siren call of easy money and women and tight boy-ass and lands sake don't get my blood up I am subject to tell a tale make your cock stand up and yipe for the pink pearly way of young cunt or the lovely brown mucous-covered palpitating tune of the young boy-ass play your cock like a recorder... and when you hit the prostate pearl sharp diamonds gather in the golden lad balls inexorable as a kidney stone.... Sorry I had to kill you.... The old grey mare aint what she used to be.... Cant run down an audience... got to bring down that house on the wing, run or sit.... Like an old lion took bad with cavities he need that Amident toothpaste keep a feller biting fresh at all times.... Them old lions shit sure turn boyeater.... And who can blame them, boys being so sweet so cold so fair in St. James Infirmary?? Now, son, don't you get rigor mortis on me. Show respect for the aging prick.... You may be a tedious old fuck yourself some day.... Oh, uh; I guess not.... You have, like Housman's barefoot shameless catamite The Congealed Shropshire Ingenue set your fleet foot on the silo of change.... But you cant kill those Shropshire boys... been hanged so often he resist it like a gonococcus half castrate with pencillin rallies to a hideous strength and multiplies geometric.... So leave us cast a vote for decent acquittal and put an end to those beastly exhibitions for which the sheriff levy a pound of fiesh." Sheriff: "I'll lower his pants for a pound, folks. Step right up. A serious and scientific exhibit concerning the locality of the Life Center. This character has nine inches, ladies and gentlemen, measure them yourself inside. Only one pound, one queer three dollar bill to see a young boy come three times at least -- I never demean myself to process a eunuch -- completely against his will .

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  147 o In Constantinople, he studied biblical exegesis with the great theologian Gregory of Nazianzus. o Jerome spent three years as the secretary and counselor to Pope Damasus I, one of the most powerful of the early bishops of Rome. Damasus assigned him the task of translating the entire bible into Latin in order to provide a standard text (the Vulgate) to replace the many “Old Latin” versions. o Jerome moved to Bethlehem in 389, where he lived as a hermit until his death in 419/20. Among his many writings, his Lives of Eminent Men is an indispensable biographical source for early Christian history. His commentaries on biblical books also show careful attention to historical realities and linguistic accuracy. o Jerome’s towering achievement was undoubtedly the Vulgate translation of the Old Testament (from Hebrew) and the New Testament (from Greek), which provided the standard text for medieval Latin Christianity. • The final doctor, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), is by far the best known man of late antiquity because of his autobiographical Confessions (composed in 397/98). It is a remarkable composition, both as the first truly introspective analysis of a personal life in antiquity and as a sustained song of praise to God. o Born in North Africa of a pagan father and a devout Christian mother (Monica), Augustine was educated in rhetoric and lived what he later considered a dissolute life, siring an illegitimate son. o He converted to the dualistic religion called Manichaeism (a combination of Persian and Christian Gnostic systems), attracted by its ascetical appeal. He embraced its radical dualism between matter and spirit, which seemed to offer Augustine’s intellectual soul some liberation from his passion- driven body.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  thought: What kind of yoke is that of two believers, sharing one hope, one desire, one discipline, one and the same service? Both are brethren, both fellow-servants; there is no difference of spirit or of flesh…Together they pray, together prostrate themselves, together perform their fasts; mutually teaching, mutually exhorting, mutually sustaining. Equally are both in the Church of God; equally at the banquet of God; equally in straits, in persecutions, in refreshments. [35] Admittedly, in that quotation one does not hear anything directly about the physical dimension of marriage, though Tertullian was insistent on the virtue of marriage for the bringing up of Christian children. He could remind a follower of the revisionist theologian Marcion that ‘if there be no marriage, there is no sanctity.’ [36] The North African was caught between his strong desire to defend marriage against gnostics, Marcionites or any other Christian who denigrated human physicality, and his equally strong sympathy with Paul of Tarsus’s gloomy thoughts on fornication. In the course of his career, Tertullian’s conversion to the rigour of Montanist Christianity darkened his view of marital sex. ‘[Marriage] too, in the shameful act which constitutes its essence, is the same as fornication,’ he said; and he underlined that this applied even to a Christian’s first marriage. It is significant that 150 years later, Jerome was able to quarry Tertullian’s writings, often without acknowledgement, for his own relentless denigration of marriage in general (below, Chapter 9). [37] Moreover, all through his career, Tertullian was one of the loudest Christian voices opposing any second marriage after bereavement, let alone divorce. On more than one occasion he commended the legendary (and of course pre-Christian) Queen Dido, who in the version of her story told in Tertullian’s native North Africa chose to cast herself on a funeral pyre rather than remarry – so much for Paul of Tarsus’s remark that it was better to marry than burn with lust. [38] * Tertullian was an increasingly rare and marginalized figure in Christian theology as a married man writing about marriage. Moreover, he had the disadvantage of writing in Latin, which in his time was still the third language of Christianity after Greek and Syriac. What proved really decisive was the contribution of teachers and writers in Christian groups around Alexandria’s thriving and venerable schools of Greek higher education – at the turn of the second and third centuries, the greatest fount of long-lasting theological discussion in mainstream Christianity. Clement of Alexandria’s extended consideration of marriage was certainly not short on informed detail: Peter Brown notes that Clement’s early twentieth-century editors felt that his discussion of married sexual intercourse was embarrassingly frank, and that he ought to have known better. [39] Nevertheless the line that Clement took on marriage was to defend it by faint praise; not as far from encratite condemnation of the fleshliness of sex as one might expect.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  147 o In Constantinople, he studied biblical exegesis with the great theologian Gregory of Nazianzus. o Jerome spent three years as the secretary and counselor to Pope Damasus I, one of the most powerful of the early bishops of Rome. Damasus assigned him the task of translating the entire bible into Latin in order to provide a standard text (the Vulgate) to replace the many “Old Latin” versions. o Jerome moved to Bethlehem in 389, where he lived as a hermit until his death in 419/20. Among his many writings, his Lives of Eminent Men is an indispensable biographical source for early Christian history. His commentaries on biblical books also show careful attention to historical realities and linguistic accuracy. o Jerome’s towering achievement was undoubtedly the Vulgate translation of the Old Testament (from Hebrew) and the New Testament (from Greek), which provided the standard text for medieval Latin Christianity. • The final doctor, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), is by far the best known man of late antiquity because of his autobiographical Confessions (composed in 397/98). It is a remarkable composition, both as the first truly introspective analysis of a personal life in antiquity and as a sustained song of praise to God. o Born in North Africa of a pagan father and a devout Christian mother (Monica), Augustine was educated in rhetoric and lived what he later considered a dissolute life, siring an illegitimate son. o He converted to the dualistic religion called Manichaeism (a combination of Persian and Christian Gnostic systems), attracted by its ascetical appeal. He embraced its radical dualism between matter and spirit, which seemed to offer Augustine’s intellectual soul some liberation from his passion- driven body.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  227 • The army of Christian knights crossed the Balkans and Asia Minor, conquering Antioch in 1098 and liberating Jerusalem in 1099. The First Crusade was far and away the most successful of all the expeditions. o Fortified Latin states were established in Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch, and Edessa, with subsidiary fiefdoms established in Galilee, Transjordan, Jaffa, and Ascalon. The states lasted from 50 to 100 years. o In Jerusalem in 1099, some knights banded together to provide hospice for pilgrims (the Knights Hospitaller), and in 1119, others vowed to protect pilgrims on their way to the church of the Holy Sepulchre (the Knights Templar). These knights organized themselves along the lines of religious orders, with a commitment to piety. The Second Crusade • The Second Crusade was called by Pope Eugene III in 1147 because of the shocking collapse of the Latin state of Edessa to the Saracens. • The pope enlisted Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the most influential figures in Christendom, to preach the Crusade, which Bernard did through an extended tour. • This Crusade was led by King Louis VII of France and King Conrad III of Germany. Once more, mob action was carried out against Jews across Germany, leading Bernard and other leaders to condemn such action. • The military effort in the East was a failure, except for the 13,000 troops who—carrying out another, more local program—managed to free Lisbon from Muslim control. o The great Kurdish Muslim general Saladin (1138–1192) overran Jerusalem and eliminated the Latin state there in 1187. o The Christians were reduced to occupying the stronghold at Tyre, a humiliating setback.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  partners. The system was disintegrating in the late medieval period thanks to social change, but not fast enough for many serfs, some of whom had become prosperous on their tied property, resented the restrictions on their families and found their status shaming. Accordingly, some ingenious fifteenth-century lawyer invented a legal process to guarantee serfs freedom, dependent on the principle that serfdom passes through the male line, and that therefore someone whose father is unknown cannot be a serf: bastardia contra villenagium , ‘bastardy against villeinage’, as an anonymous clerk once gleefully commented in the margin of his legal register. This charade was dependent on co-operation between the bishop of a diocese and the royal courts of the ‘common law’ in Westminster (the Court of Common Pleas took the business on): it produced a neat legal fiction. The serf began a legal action about a more-or-less fictional piece of land against his lord. The lord generally replied that the case could not be heard since the plaintiff was his serf and therefore had no legal identity – to which the serf riposted that he was illegitimate and could not be the lord’s serf (sometimes it was the lord as defendant who claimed that the plaintiff was illegitimate and so had no legal title). In consternation the judges in Common Pleas turned to the bishop of the diocese containing the relevant manor, who obligingly confirmed this rural scandal. So the legal action ended with a judgment in Common Pleas: the plaintiff lost his case, and he was declared a bastard – but he was not a serf. The whole business, of course, involved a good deal of money changing hands all round, including set legal fees. The diocese of Norwich in particular made some tidy little sums out of it, all in the name of personal freedom – the lawsuits spanned the Reformation, between around 1440 and 1580, by which time English serfdom was more or less extinct. By then, in tragic irony, Protestant England was being drawn into a different and much more inhuman institution of slavery, the Atlantic traffic between Africa and the growing colonial empires of both Catholic and Protestant European powers in the Americas. [89] It is unlikely that the ‘Reformation of Manners’ would have succeeded without the general population feeling sympathetic to a change in sexual standards, and being prepared to see those standards enforced in various forms of public shaming for fornication or adultery, such as the elaborate rituals of penance retained in the Church of Scotland, not otherwise a friend to formal liturgy. Scotland was only one example of a Reformed Protestant society where the laity were directly involved in administering this system, not merely as spectators in church, but as lay ‘elders’ who dominated the new Reformed disciplinary court known as the Consistory.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  When I walked into the house I could hear voices coming from upstairs. I climbed to the top of the steps where my mom’s bedroom was. Her door was open and immediately I realized that was where the voices were coming from. There was my moms, and she had left her bedroom door open not thinking that her little teenager would be home early, and I watched her. I stood there and watched her. At that particular time she just happened to be tricking with two men at the same time. If one was in her mouth, the other was in her cunt. If one was in her cunt, the other was in her ass, or some type of sexual combination. One would have thought my moms was made out of rubber the way they had her stretched and positioned all over the place. The shit looked like it hurt the way they were blowin’ her back out. I don’t know why, but I just continued to stand there watching. I couldn’t move. Then all of a sudden my mother turned around and faced the door. I guess she just had a feeling that someone was watching her. Someone was watching her. That someone was me, her daughter. I’ll never—I mean, never—forget the look in her eyes when they locked with mine. By then I think the tears that had welded in my eyes were running down my cheeks. Without saying a word, I curved around to the left, where my bedroom was, went into my room, and slammed the door behind me. I made it over to my trash can just in time to throw up. I had already thrown up twice at school. But then it was because my stomach was sick, this time it was because my heart was. Of course, Naomi continued fucking those two men. She had to. Everybody knows if dem niggas don’t bust a nut, a ho don’t get paid. Once the two trick niggas finally left, I heard the front door close, and then I heard Naomi come back upstairs. Please don’t come in my room, I remember thinking. Please don’t come in my room. I was embarrassed for her. I knew my moms was a whore, everybody knew she was a whore, but to see it with my own eyes was just too much for me to take. My moms didn’t come into my room, but I could have sworn I heard her standing outside my door. She never came in, though.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Piarist foundations spread as far as Poland, showed a pleasing interest in new mathematical advances and in the research of Galileo, and were characterized in their early years by their relentless holy poverty. Calasanz was a deeply austere man and was never himself accused of any sexual misbehaviour; his twin weaknesses were poor judgement of character and indulging particular favourites among his brethren. The Piarists then became the theatre of a classic child-abuse scandal, complete with cover-ups and perpetrators being promoted out of the way. [75] Sexual scandal began to gain publicity only six years after the Order’s formal papal approval, but the real trouble awaited the rise within its ranks of a rich Roman lawyer’s son, Stefano Cherubini, a pleasure-loving young man whom Calasanz quickly over-promoted. Cherubini soon set out drastically to modify the Order’s strict mode of life; then in 1629 Calasanz was urgently informed of far more serious sexual offences involving pupils of Cherubini’s school in Naples. The old man, browbeaten by Cherubini and fearful for the future of his Order, took no action, despite a raft of explicit evidence from furious Piarist colleagues. He wrote to Cherubini: There is no one in the world today that wishes more than I that this rumour would disappear…because I have at heart the honour of the Order and of the individual people in it more than anyone else…The Lord make everything disappear as I wish and pray to his divine Majesty. [76] Repeatedly in Calasanz’s letters comes a preferred way forward: ‘it seems best to me, that if we are allowed to be the judges of this case, we will not permit it to come into the hands of outsiders.’ In later years, Calasanz added another reason for the cover-up: respect for Cherubini’s distinguished family. In a pattern later all too familiar, Cherubini was promoted to Visitor General to get him away from the scene of his misdeeds. In the end the outraged chorus from the majority of conscientious Piarists across Europe was too great to ignore, but Pope Innocent X’s Gordian-Knot-style solution in 1646 was simply to dissolve the Order. Several decades passed, and it was only refounded after all the principal actors were dead. The Piarists survived to educate an array of European great names from Mozart to Goya to Pope Pius IX to Egon Ronay. In 1948, Pope Pius XII named Joseph Calasanz as patron saint of Christian schools; it took a conscientious modern researcher to find the scandal still buried in Piarist archives, despite earlier efforts at archival weeding. [77] The sorry tale is worth setting out at length because it illuminates two separate Catholic ideals intertwining with toxic results: the enforcement of clerical celibacy, and the provision of education for all. There was nothing new about child abuse in a clerical context as we have seen in Egypt and early medieval Ireland, but the Counter-Reformation brought a new structural problem without precedent in the Church.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Vast adolescent muttering. Silver guard rail... chasm a thousand feet down into the glittering sunlight. Little: green plots of cabbage and lettuce. Brown youths with adzes spied by the old queen across a sewage canal. "Oh dear, I wonder if they fertilize with human excrement.... Maybe they'll do it right now." He flips out mother of pearl opera glasses -- Aztec mosaic in the sun. Long line of Greek lads march up with alabaster bowls of shit, empty into the limestone marl hole. Dusty poplars shake across the red brick Plaza de Toros in the afternoon wind. Wooden cubicles around a hot spring... rubble of ruined walls in a grove of cottonwoods... the benches worn smooth as metal by a million masturbating boys. Greek lads white as marble fuck dog style on the portico of a great golden temple... naked Mugwump twangs a lute. Walking down by the tracks in his red sweater met Sammy the Dock Keeper's son with two Mexicans. "Hey, Skinny," he said, "want to get screwed?" "Well... Yeah." On a ruined straw mattress the Mexican pulled him up on all fours -- Negro boy dance around them beating out the strokes... sun through a knot hole pink spotlights his cock. A waste of raw pink shame to the pastel blue horizon where vast iron mesas crash into the shattered sky, "It's all right." The God screams through you three thousand year rusty load.... Hail of crystal skulls shattered the greenhouse to slivers in the winter moon.... The American woman has left a whiff of poison behind in the dank St. Louis garden party. Pool covered with green slime in a ruined French garden. Huge pathic frog rises slowly from the water on a mud platform playing the clavichord. A Sollubi rushes into the bar and starts polishing The Saint's shoes with the oil on his nose.... The Saint kicks him petulantly in the mouth. The Sollubi screams, whirls around and shits on the Saint's pants. Then he dashes into the street. A pimp looks after him speculatively.... The Saint calls the manager: "Jesus, Al, what kinda creep joint you running here? My brand new fishskin Dégagées..." "I'm sorry, Saint. He slipped by me." (The Sollubi are an untouchable caste in Arabia noted for their abject vileness. De luxe cafes are equipped with Sollubi who rim the guests while they eat -- holes in the seating benches being provided for this purpose. Citizens who want to be utterly humiliated and degraded -- so many people do, nowadays, hoping to jump the gun -- over themselves up for passive homosexual intercourse to an encampment of Sollubis.... Nothing like it, they tell me.... In fact, the Sollubi are subject to become wealthy and arrogant and lose their native vileness. What is origin of untouchable? Perhaps a fallen priest caste. In fact, untouchables perform a priestly function in taking on themselves all human vileness.) A.