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

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

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  For a long while I thought I had escaped, but as time goes on I see that I am no better, that I am even a little worse, because I saw more clearly than they ever did and yet remained powerless to alter my life. As I look back on my life it seems to me that I never did anything of my own volition but always through the pressure of others. People often think of me as an adventurous fellow; nothing could be farther from the truth. My adventures were always adventitious, always thrust on me, always endured rather than undertaken. I am of the very essence of that proud, boastful Nordic people who have never had the least sense of adventure but who nevertheless have scoured the earth, turned it upside down, scattering relics and ruins everywhere. Restless spirits, but not adventurous ones. Agonizing spirits, incapable of living in the present. Disgraceful cowards, all of them, myself included. For there is only one great adventure and that is inward toward the self, and for that, time nor space nor even deeds matter. Once every few years I was on the verge of making this discovery, but in characteristic fashion I always managed to dodge the issue. If I try to think of a good excuse I can think only of the environment, of the streets I knew and the people who inhabited them. I can think of no street in America, or of people inhabiting such a street, capable of leading one on toward the discovery of the self. I have walked the streets in many countries of the world but nowhere have I felt so degraded and humiliated as in America. I think of all the streets in America combined as forming a huge cesspool, a cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and drained away to everlasting shit. Over this cesspool the spirit of work weaves a magic wand; palaces and factories spring up side by side, and munition plants and chemical works and steel mills and sanatoriums and prisons and insane asylums. The whole continent is a nightmare producing the greatest misery of the greatest number. I was one, a single entity in the midst of the greatest jamboree of wealth and happiness (statistical wealth, statistical happiness) but I never met a man who was truly wealthy or truly happy. At least I knew that I was unhappy, un-wealthy, out of whack and out of step. That was my only solace, my only joy. But it was hardly enough. It would have been better for my peace of mind, for my soul, if I had expressed my rebellion openly, if I had gone to jail for it, if I had rotted there and died. It would have been better if, like the mad Czolgosz, I had shot some good President McKinley, some gentle, insignificant soul like that who had never done anyone the least harm.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones. In fact, I would have the reader see “nine” and “fourteen” as the boundaries—the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks—of an enchanted island haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea. Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not. Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we nympholepts, would have long gone insane. Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world of synchronous phenomena than on that intangible island of entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes. Within the same age limits the number of true nymphets is strikingly inferior to that of provisionally plain, or just nice, or “cute,” or even “sweet” and “attractive,” ordinary, plumpish, formless, cold-skinned, essentially human little girls, with tummies and pigtails, who may or may not turn into adults of great beauty (look at the ugly dumplings in black stockings and white hats that are metamorphosed into stunning stars of the screen). A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “I heard a rumor,” he said. “About you and . . . well, I heard a rumor that you’re a dyke now. Is that true?” Marta flinched. It was such a hard word. “Don’t be a dog, Peter. Don’t be ugly.” “Wow,” he said. “I can’t believe it. No wonder. Wow.” He looked at her with pity and shock. He looked at her in a way that she did not deserve to be looked at, she thought. She swallowed thickly. She set her jaw. She turned to him. “You do not get to talk to me that way,” she said. “You do not get to treat me like that.” “I’m just saying, I had no idea. That whole time we were together, you just. Wow.” “It was not about you,” she said. “It was never about you.” Peter put his hand on the door and pushed it open. He shook his head sadly, ruefully. “This will break Irina’s heart,” he said. “This will just break her heart.” When Peter left, Marta sat in her car for a long time. Her eyes stung. Her lip trembled. Her elbows ached. Her head hurt. She got out of the car and went into the house. She ran a tub full of water and got into it with her clothes still on. She was like that when Sigrid got home and found her. “Baby, what’s wrong?” Sigrid asked from the doorway. “What’s happened here?” It was not chastising. It was not harsh. It was a gentle question. “Peter came by,” she said. “His mother is dying.” “Oh, that’s awful,” Sigrid said. She kneeled next to the tub and ran her hands through Marta’s hair. Her expression was concerned. Marta looked at her. “He found out about me,” she said. “I don’t know how, but he found out.” “Found out what?” Sigrid asked. “About me. About us. He found out.” “Oh,” Sigrid said. She looked a little surprised and a little perplexed. “I’m sorry, baby. I don’t understand.” “He didn’t know. He didn’t know about us, and now he does. And he . . . well, he didn’t know.” “That’s okay,” she said. “I didn’t want him to know,” Marta said. The water had gone cold and her clothes were scratching up her skin. “Well, now he does. But it’s okay.” “It’s not okay,” Marta said, and she shivered. “He’s going to tell everyone.” “Who is this everyone? Who?” Sigrid asked, kissing Marta’s cheek and her forehead. But Marta felt like a part of herself was streaming into the world, spreading all over without her permission. She felt something important was escaping. “Everyone,” she said wildly, and she just kept saying that while Sigrid held her hand under the water.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He left the table and sat next to Charles on the floor. Closer to the window, he could hear the wind kissing the narrow gap at the top of the pillowcase. He reached up and back, his shoulder pinching a little, and pulled the broken halves of the ruler down. On the back, the blue marker had faded to black. He’d written his name there and the year he’d gotten it. Charles took the ruler from him and put the two halves together. “This has seen better days.” “Yeah,” Lionel said. Charles made to throw the ruler into the trash across the room. Lionel reached for it. “Don’t do that.” “It’s busted,” Charles said, holding the ruler out away from Lionel. “What’s the deal?” “It’s not yours. You can’t throw something out when it’s not yours.” Charles turned toward him and pushed him onto his back. Then sat on Lionel’s stomach. He held the ruler over his head, out of Lionel’s reach. “Your boyfriend give you this?” “No,” Lionel said. “No.” Lionel closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see Charles mocking him. But then Charles started to drum on the kitchen counter with the ends of the ruler. It was the music he had been humming. Charles squeezed his knees tight to Lionel’s sides. “This isn’t funny,” Lionel said. “It’s not a joke.” He reached up for the ruler, and Charles caught his wrist, held his arm still. His first thought was that Charles was going to tickle him, and he flinched in anticipation for it. The extension of this horrible game. But Charles did not tickle him. No. He did something much worse. He leaned down and looked closely at the keloids. His breath was close on Lionel’s skin, warm, damp. But it was the brightness in his eyes that made Lionel look away. He didn’t want to see Charles seeing him. Lionel tried to pull his arm free, but Charles was stronger than him. They both knew that, and it made Lionel feel more pathetic for struggling as he did. “Don’t,” Lionel said. Charles kissed the keloids, and Lionel almost jumped out of his skin at the shock of it. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Lionel said. “Watch me,” Charles said. He kissed the heel of Lionel’s palm, and then moved down the tributaries of his veins, down the whole length of his arm. Kissing him again and again, until they were face-to-face. It was an ugly, cruel thing to do, Lionel thought. It was as mean a thing as he could have imagined. He couldn’t look at Charles, not after Charles had done what he did. “I wish you hadn’t,” Lionel said. Charles got off him then, and Lionel sat up. Blood had pooled in the back of his head, making him dizzy.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

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

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Not because he objected in principle, but because it implied that the two of them sitting in Lionel’s kitchen was fake. Not real. “Sure,” Lionel said. “I’m a big faker.” He left the table and sat next to Charles on the floor. Closer to the window, he could hear the wind kissing the narrow gap at the top of the pillowcase. He reached up and back, his shoulder pinching a little, and pulled the broken halves of the ruler down. On the back, the blue marker had faded to black. He’d written his name there and the year he’d gotten it. Charles took the ruler from him and put the two halves together. “This has seen better days.” “Yeah,” Lionel said. Charles made to throw the ruler into the trash across the room. Lionel reached for it. “Don’t do that.” “It’s busted,” Charles said, holding the ruler out away from Lionel. “What’s the deal?” “It’s not yours. You can’t throw something out when it’s not yours.” Charles turned toward him and pushed him onto his back. Then sat on Lionel’s stomach. He held the ruler over his head, out of Lionel’s reach. “Your boyfriend give you this?” “No,” Lionel said. “No.” Lionel closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see Charles mocking him. But then Charles started to drum on the kitchen counter with the ends of the ruler. It was the music he had been humming. Charles squeezed his knees tight to Lionel’s sides. “This isn’t funny,” Lionel said. “It’s not a joke.” He reached up for the ruler, and Charles caught his wrist, held his arm still. His first thought was that Charles was going to tickle him, and he flinched in anticipation for it. The extension of this horrible game. But Charles did not tickle him. No. He did something much worse. He leaned down and looked closely at the keloids. His breath was close on Lionel’s skin, warm, damp. But it was the brightness in his eyes that made Lionel look away. He didn’t want to see Charles seeing him. Lionel tried to pull his arm free, but Charles was stronger than him. They both knew that, and it made Lionel feel more pathetic for struggling as he did. “Don’t,” Lionel said. Charles kissed the keloids, and Lionel almost jumped out of his skin at the shock of it. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Lionel said. “Watch me,” Charles said. He kissed the heel of Lionel’s palm, and then moved down the tributaries of his veins, down the whole length of his arm. Kissing him again and again, until they were face-to-face. It was an ugly, cruel thing to do, Lionel thought. It was as mean a thing as he could have imagined. He couldn’t look at Charles, not after Charles had done what he did. “I wish you hadn’t,” Lionel said.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “I give exams for professors. I do entrance exams, too.” Lionel’s appetite shrank to a tiny white heat in the pit of his stomach. He was ashamed of proctoring only when he had to tell other people about it, and only when those people knew that he had once been a graduate student with good brain chemistry. He didn’t think proctoring was bad, but he could see how other people saw him the moment they heard it and how they appraised his life as it was by the metric of what it had once been. “You’re pulling my leg. From math genius to proctor? Is that even a real thing?” “It is,” Lionel said. “It’s what I do.” “How’d that happen?” “I just sort of fell into it,” Lionel said. “Steep fall.” “Not as steep as you’d imagine.” Charles narrowed his eyes but smiled. Lionel felt a crackle of static between them. “Is that your heart’s desire? To proctor?” “Is your heart’s desire to interrogate strangers at a dinner party like a Chekhov character?” “I don’t know what that is,” Charles said dryly, and Lionel snorted. The solidity of the sound startled him. Charles went back to spinning his fork. Lionel resisted the urge to respond, grateful for the opportunity to drop down and out of the conversation. It was clear to him now, in a way that it hadn’t been before, that he and every other graduate student depended on the currency of their university affiliations to get by in conversations. As though academia were a satellite constantly pinging, letting him know who and where he was. It wasn’t until he had come out of that life that he realized he had no real way of relating to people without it. People looked at him differently when he didn’t mention that he’d once been a student or that he had a university affiliation. They looked through him, but the worst part of it was that he sometimes looked through himself in the same way. “You like it?” Charles asked. “It gives me time to think,” Lionel said. “It’s funny. I used to think so fast. Like, sometimes, I felt like I was having six different conversations in my head, all at once. But now it takes me a year just to get to the end of one thought.” “If I were that in my head, I’d kill myself,” Charles said. “Sounds awful. Jesus.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

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

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  No sooner would such a temptation present itself than I would smother it. The effect was of snuffing out a candle, two candles, a row of twenty, until the lens pulled back to reveal an entire votive stand exhaling a hundred thin lines of smoke as a terraced offering before the shrine. In this religion hidden lights had been declared superior to those that glared. Somewhere I was storing up merit, accumulating the credit I’d need to buy, one day, the salvation I longed for. Until then (and it was a reckoning that could be forestalled indefinitely, that I preferred putting off) I’d live in that happiest of all conditions: the long but seemingly prosperous courtship. It was a series of tests, ever more arduous, even perverse. For instance, I was required to deny my love in order to prove it. “You know,” Tom said one day, “you can stay over any time you like. Harold”—the minister’s son, my old partner at Squirrel—“warned me you’d jump me in my sleep. You gotta forgive me. It’s just I don’t go in for that weird stuff.” I swallowed painfully and whispered, “Nor—” I cleared my throat and said too primly, “Nor do I.” The medical smell, that Lysol smell of homosexuality, was staining the air again as the rubber-wheeled metal cart of drugs and disinfectants rolled silently by. I longed to open the window, to go away for an hour and come back to a room free of that odor, the smell of shame. I never doubted that homosexuality was a sickness; in fact, I took it as a measure of how unsparingly objective I was that I could contemplate this very sickness. But in some other part of my mind I couldn’t believe that the Lysol smell must bathe me, too, that its smell of stale coal fumes must penetrate my love for Tom. Perhaps I became so vague, so exhilarated with vagueness, precisely in order to forestall a recognition of the final term of the syllogism that begins: If one man loves another he is a homosexual; I love a man … I’d heard that boys passed through a stage of homosexuality, that this stage was normal, nearly universal—then that must be what was happening to me. A stage. A prolonged stage. Soon enough this stage would revolve, and after Tom’s bedroom vanished, on would trundle white organdy, blue ribbons, a smiling girl opening her arms … But that would come later. As for now, I could continue to look as long as I liked into Tom’s eyes the color of faded lapis beneath brows so blond they were visible only at the roots just to each side of his nose—a faint smudge turning gold as it thinned and sped out toward the temples.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  When she felt the blood rush back to her face she sat up and took a sip of water. Then she lay back against her pillows and thumbed through the paper until she came to her favorite section. Debutante Judith Merck, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. George Merck of West Orange, a student at Sarah Lawrence College, will be presented tomorrow night at the Grosvenor Ball. After, Miss Merck will be heading anywhere there’s snow for some holiday skiing. She closed her eyes, picturing Miss Judith Merck in her white ball gown at the Grosvenor Ball, dancing the first dance with her father. She tried to imagine herself wearing a beautiful long white dress, dancing with her father, though she’d never seen a photo of him. She was glad she didn’t have her father’s last name. Monsky —ugh! No one ever said his name. She still wouldn’t know it if Henry hadn’t taken her to Spirito’s for a pizza last April, on the day President Truman had relieved General MacArthur of his command. The whole school had been called to the auditorium to listen to MacArthur’s speech. Old soldiers never die—they just fade away. Eleanor was allowed to cover the story in the school paper, because of the special assembly. She explained why President Truman had fired General MacArthur, had kicked him out of the military for insubordination after MacArthur voiced disagreement with his policies. Most kids dumped the paper in the trash, as usual. But Miri had read every word. She’d asked Uncle Henry about it. He’d been surprised but pleased by her interest. Between bites of pepperoni, he’d explained. “I want you to know the truth, Miri. Always.” So she’d gathered all her courage and asked him about her father, just la-di-dah, as if they were still talking about the president and the general. She prayed Henry couldn’t tell how fast her heart was beating. He swallowed the food in his mouth, swigged some Pabst Blue Ribbon, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and told her. Not everything. She knew he was holding back, but for now, she was satisfied just to know her father’s name, Mike Monsky, that he and Rusty had gone out for a few months and—Bingo! —she was pregnant. She didn’t say what she was thinking—You can’t get pregnant from playing Bingo. Once, when Miri was in sixth grade, she’d tried asking Rusty. “So this father of mine…is he alive or dead?” The color had drained out of Rusty’s face. “I don’t know.” “Come on, Mom…” “Honestly, Miri, I don’t know.” “Were you married to him?” “That’s a hard question to answer.” “Either you were or you weren’t.” “I said that’s a hard question to answer, Miri.” “I just want to know if I’m a bastard or not.” Rusty exploded. “Don’t ever let me hear you using that word! That word has nothing to do with you.” Then she choked up.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  A Representative Freak—that’s the paradox that lies at the heart of this novel. I say a “novel” because I wanted the alibi of fiction to give me the permission to change things around in order to make them more typical. In real life I had had many, many sexual experiences by the time I was sixteen, but I knew that my sort of compulsive and precocious sexuality was so atypical that few readers would be able to identify with it. In real life I was an intermittently gifted student, who had already written two full-length novels by age eighteen, even if they were amateurish and unpublishable; I was also fairly popular with the other boys at school, despite my odd personality. In creating the narrator-protagonist of A Boy’s Own Story , however, I wanted to play down all this precociousness and even my intense friendships. I was also quite conscious of working my way through my own version of all those coming-out stories I’d heard over the years, and to show their predominant features. I wanted to describe the first time. I wanted to show the terrible guilt. I wanted to represent the urge to seek professional help, first from a minister and later from a shrink. I wanted to explore the quandary of a simultaneous longing to be straight and a longing to have sex with men. The most controversial part of the book was the ending (which I won’t give away), since it showed the main character in an unsympathetic light. Those closing pages, however, mirrored the most shameful moment in my own young life. Over the years the conclusion has been variously interpreted as the painful, disillusioning beginning of adulthood or as the self-hating action of a boy deformed by a repressive and destructive era. I can distinctly remember that throughout the long composition of A Boy’s Own Story I kept wondering whether I would have the courage to show this reprehensible moment. How has the reception of gay fiction changed since 1982, the year that A Boy’s Own Story was first published in the States? There has been a tremendous explosion in gay and lesbian fiction.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Think of those young boys in their silk shirts at parties, with no one to look out for them, being given plastic cups of champagne. Think of the giddy high of being with people who understood what you did and what you loved instead of being shoved into a locker by a bunch of lacrosse jerks who got drunk on their dads’ boats and drowned on lazy summer nights. Think of those poor young dancers, aching knees and throbbing feet. Their eyes stinging with sweat. Think of the young dancers. Charles clenched his jaw and squared his shoulders. “I do think of them,” he said. Farnland sucked his teeth, the most ungraceful gesture Charles had ever seen him make. He looked at his fingernails as if Charles were worth less than what prospective dirt might be found there. He deserved that, he thought. Fair enough. “Your knee?” “Can barely feel a thing,” Charles ground out. In truth, he should have listened to Sophie last night and gone home to ice it. He had no business running through the snow after Lionel, and now dancing on it. “You’re listing,” Farnland said. “No way you’re making it through rehearsal tonight.” Charles had been selected by Farnland to dance in some Balanchine rip-off. It was all cheap schmaltz and feeling. Neither classical nor contemporary. It existed in that middle ground of hazily choreographed vaporware. He would not have considered it had Farnland not mentioned to him that his former apprentice ran PNB and would be interested in seeing some of Charles’s tape if it included parts of this new work. It was a blatant quid pro quo, Charles knew. Don’t say anything about fondling the little boys and he could have a chance to dance for PNB, which was not a great company, it was true, though it was a little better than he could otherwise reasonably hope for. But the knee, which had started to burn at the start of fall, now throbbed regularly. “Maybe you should take it easy. Lay off,” Farnland said with real human kindness in his voice. Charles watched Farnland’s hand rise just a little, like he meant to reach out for him. Charles shifted away at the thought of that touch, and Farnland’s hand fell back into place. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m more than fine. I’ll live.” “We can get Viktor to dance for you. It’s no problem. He’d probably love it. No need for you to make it worse just for a rehearsal.” Charles cleared his throat and stood a little taller. He summoned what heat he had left burning in him and bore down on the choreographer. “It’s mine,” he said. “I’ll dance it.” “You could have a long career, Charles. Teaching. Dancing isn’t the only thing.” The choreographer slapped Charles’s thigh with the back of his hand —“Think about it. Don’t be dumb. You know how many teachers end up gimps? And why?” “I’m doing your faggy little dance. Ease off.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  “Yeah, it really hurts. You see, I was boiling some water—” “Sh-h-h!” she urges me. In real life she’s always shutting me up; in the fiction of the hospital she’s silencing me in the interest of my recovery. “You’ll feel much better once I change your dressing. Please be quiet. I won’t hurt you.” We’re both bored. It’s six on a December night and the sky outside the filmy hotel curtains (they smell of coal smoke) has long been dark. The phone hasn’t rung all day—none of us is popular, that’s evident. Not my sister, not me, not Mom. “Ouch!” I whine. “That bandage is too tight!” “It’s not!” “It is so.” “It’s not.” “I’m telling you it is so.” “Well, just play with yourself,” my sister says. “I don’t want to play with you. You wanna know why? Do you? Wanna know why?” I’m sitting up in bed now, uneasy, wishing I hadn’t complained about the bandage. “I’ll tell you why: you smell bad. You do.” My sister sticks her face right into mine. One of her barrettes has come loose without her noticing, and suddenly an unexpectedly adult sweep of hair frames her face and caresses her shoulder. She’s so close that some of her hair grazes my cheek. “I do not,” I mumble uncertainly. Perhaps I do smell bad. But where is the bad smell coming from? My mouth? My bottom? My feet? I long to creep into the bathroom, to cup a hand over my mouth and nose and test my breath for foulness, then to examine my underwear for skid marks. Or is the bad smell inside me, the terrible decaying Camembert of my heart? “You do. You smell bad and I hate you. Wherever you go you smell bad, you stink up the place, how do you think I like having people think you’re my brother? And look at your big nostrils. And you’re such a big sissy, you can’t even throw a baseball, you throw like a girl, you can’t even walk right, you’re a gimp. You are. I’m not kidding.” Now it all seems too true. I’m an embarrassment—to my mother, my sister, most of all to myself. I haven’t a right to take up the space I occupy. I poison every room I enter. “Look at your nails,” my sister says, grabbing my hand and holding it under my nose for inspection. “You’ve got black gook under there. You’re icky. You really are. It’s probably poop. Do you play with your poop. You play with your poop, you play with your poop, you play with your poop.…”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  When his parents showed up, he was bloodshot and cold. His father guffawed and said, You look homeless. The doctor flinched at that, but Lionel knew he was only trying to make a joke. To be easy. His father was an engineer who worked in oil. He had worked on a new method to extract oil from shale. Before Houston his father had been in North Dakota, and before North Dakota he had been in Wyoming, and before Wyoming he had been married. Lionel’s mother cried when she saw him and asked why he had done it, but the doctor said, We don’t ask that here. That is private. His mother looked at the doctor and said, Nothing about my child is private from me, and Lionel had wanted to say that his mother had taken the locks off his door when he was little and never put them back. His parents left that first time, going back to his place to get his toiletries and a change of clothes. The doctor said Lionel didn’t have to go with them when they returned for him if he did not want to. He could stay. Lionel asked the doctor about the pain in his lower back, and the doctor offered to give him Valium, but said it was habit-forming. It’s not that bad, Lionel said then. The pain was all right. He could live with it. A couple of weeks later, he checked into a private care facility outside Detroit. The facility had large, rolling lawns. There were cedar and pine trees, trails to walk. They called it hiking, though it was really just walking to the top of a modestly steep hill and looking down at the facility. From that height, one could see black fencing around the perimeter of the allotment. The building itself was the typical modernist arrangement of interlocking rectangles, edged here and there with a touch of wood paneling. It was the type of modernity that was hostile to history, to time, seemingly without precedent but utterly referential, almost dully so. The kind of building one saw so often that it had become a kind of visual cliché for money, for comfort, for aesthetic consideration.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  And then there were her other men—the one in California with all the money, who was Catholic and brought brandy alexanders to Mama’s bedside in the morning. Or the captain in the army with the sports car whom she’d met at Hot Springs, Arkansas. Or the Jew in Chicago with the sailboat, the Camel cigarettes and the skin that tanned so easily. We’d analyze their motives hour after hour as the towns and countryside sped past. We’d sing songs. We’d listen to the news. We’d point out sights to one another. But soon we’d be talking again about Herb or Bill or Abe. Did he miss our mother? What were his intentions? Was he dating anyone else? Should Mom play harder to get? Mother gained weight, sighed beside the phone, cried, hypothesized, thought up schemes of seduction or revenge, and all her technique—that is, all her helplessness—made my sister more and more ashamed of her. We were losers who talked a winning game. No wonder honesty came to mean for my sister saying only the most damaging things against herself. If she began by admitting defeat, then something was possible: sincerity, perhaps, or at least the avoidance of appearing ludicrous. My mother’s helplessness filled my sister with confusion and shame. She was confused after Mother had talked her way with conviction and obsessive tenacity all the way around the circumference of an absence. Mother would say Abe was just stringing her along, he had dozens of women, she was just another gal—one burdened, moreover, with two brats. Within half an hour she’d convinced herself that he thought so much of her he was afraid of her. She was too cultured, too intelligent, too genteel, too dynamic for him. She frightened him. I wasn’t ashamed. I was coldly indifferent as my mind closed its locks and slowly flooded with dreams. I was a king or a god. How my mother longed for that phone to ring. When my sister was old enough to date, she, too, waited by the phone. The negligence of men toward women struck me as past belief; how could these men resist so much longing? All this waiting, of course, was a petri dish in which new cultures of speculation were breeding. Was he not calling to prove a point? His independence, perhaps? Men hated feeling trapped. His own desirability? Or had he found someone else? Or was he shy and himself waiting for a call? I half wanted to be a man, a grown-up man, but a gallant one who could finally put an end to all this suffering. My other half wanted to have a man; I thought I’d know better how to get one and keep him. Or else how to punish him for his neglect.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  On my own.” “You weren’t on your own,” he says. “Them kids was here after school every day. And every weekend. And in the summer. If you was on your own, it was in some way I’ve never heard of.” “I never made you,” she says. “I never forced you or Mama Lil to look after them. You offered.” “What was we supposed to do? With a dead pappy and a mammy hooked on that stuff?” Enid sits a little straighter. Surprise and hurt are visible in her eyes, shame. The nape of Grace’s neck crackles with electricity. It’s the sort of remark that would have prompted, in another life now, a shouting match between her parents. But here, in this house, in this kitchen, on this day, Grace sees Enid work it through. Think it over. She has worked her steps. She has taken responsibility. Enid is fond of affirmations. Own Your Shit, Save Your Life and My Shame Is My Badge of Honor and My Feelings Are My Responsibility. All that pretty talk, those encompassing generalities. Toothless to Grace, but powerful to those looking for something to believe in. “That was a long time ago, Big Davis. And this is hard enough. Now, I’ve tried to make good and make right.” “You don’t know hard,” he says. “You don’t know the beginning of hard.” Grace wishes she had kept her mouth shut, that she had resisted the mean, biting part of herself. Enid and Big Davis avert their gazes, look down into their plates. Grace bites into the roast, chews it through, swallows. She’s let something ugly into the room, she knows. All that stuff about her parents, before her mother got clean and before her father died, all of it suddenly back in the room like departed ancestors of a common line. The spectral outlines of who they had once been. Grace has been trying to be better about letting that sort of thing go. Letting people be who they are now . Not holding them to account so hard, so much. Letting them change. Grow. Mutate. “It’s good,” she says of the roast. “I like the pepper sauce.” “It was kind of you to offer us dinner,” Enid says, quick to change the subject, to make good. “Y’all my kin,” he says. “Davis, too?” Grace asks, because she cannot let this chance slip by her. “Nothing stopping your brother from coming here, being here. That’s his choice,” Big Davis says coolly. Grace feels like a sulky, surly teenager. She wishes that she could simply accept things as they are, not dig around. Meddle. She wishes, too, that Davis had never asked her to. Wishes that she had more time. Then it all wouldn’t seem like such a waste. “It’s not a choice,” she says. “He was made that way.” “What made him made you,” he says. “And you ain’t that way.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  They wore jeans and T-shirts and baseball caps with logos from minor teams around the Midwest. They wore boots and sneakers. They spoke in the flat, clipped way she was accustomed to, and at first she fell right in with the rhythm of their conversation: the weather, the price of gas, the merits of cheap beer and free time. Marta, in her stretch-waist pants and scuffed steel-toes, felt at ease among them. She sat next to Sigrid along the bar, her arm loosely around her shoulders, Sigrid’s arm around her waist. Sometimes they’d catch each other’s eye and couldn’t stop from smiling. But at some point in the night the conversation cinched in the middle, as if someone had tightened a belt around it, so that all their focus and energy had been funneled down to a point so small Marta that could barely grasp it. Something about semiotics. Something about the nature of knowledge. It wasn’t that Marta was dumb. She had been an excellent student. In Indiana, she had topped the state exams in mathematics and science. She had been selected to represent her state in a national mathematics contest, had won a blue ribbon and a full scholarship. Yet in the bar that first night she had felt out of her depth, out and behind everyone else as they talked and raced full steam toward whatever they were arguing about. She’d stood there, her finger tucked through Sigrid’s belt loop, and Sigrid would sometimes look back at her with a smile, as if she were checking on a pet. She hated that look. Its knowing, gentle easiness. She hated it when people treated her like some kind of unwashed beast that needed a long leash and a slow walk. They fought about that look after the bar that night as Marta drove Sigrid home to the Near East Side, over by Willy Street Co-op, where Sigrid worked shifts and bought ugly produce half-off. In Sigrid’s driveway, they parked and listened to the engine click. Marta clenched the wheel because she didn’t know what else to do with her hands. Sigrid was drunk and tired, over it already. “You think I’m dumb,” she said. But Sigrid said, “Don’t put it on me, Marta. If you feel that way, it’s because you feel that way.” And Marta said, “No. It’s not me. It’s not. I do feel that way, but it’s not because of me, or not just because of it. You know that.” Sigrid leaned over the center console and kissed her, and Marta pushed her away, “No, no, we are talking.” But Sigrid just smiled and kissed her—once, twice, three times—and then she felt Sigrid’s hand sliding past the elastic of her pants and pressing flat against the outside of her underwear. Marta felt hot and suffocated, but Sigrid started to massage her there, and she felt loose and buoyed up on a wave of static.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He did it again, just like that, a neat little trick. “Then what do you do?” “I proctor exams,” Lionel said. “You what now?” “I give exams for professors. I do entrance exams, too.” Lionel’s appetite shrank to a tiny white heat in the pit of his stomach. He was ashamed of proctoring only when he had to tell other people about it, and only when those people knew that he had once been a graduate student with good brain chemistry. He didn’t think proctoring was bad, but he could see how other people saw him the moment they heard it and how they appraised his life as it was by the metric of what it had once been. “You’re pulling my leg. From math genius to proctor? Is that even a real thing?” “It is,” Lionel said. “It’s what I do.” “How’d that happen?” “I just sort of fell into it,” Lionel said. “Steep fall.” “Not as steep as you’d imagine.” Charles narrowed his eyes but smiled. Lionel felt a crackle of static between them. “Is that your heart’s desire? To proctor?” “Is your heart’s desire to interrogate strangers at a dinner party like a Chekhov character?” “I don’t know what that is,” Charles said dryly, and Lionel snorted. The solidity of the sound startled him. Charles went back to spinning his fork. Lionel resisted the urge to respond, grateful for the opportunity to drop down and out of the conversation. It was clear to him now, in a way that it hadn’t been before, that he and every other graduate student depended on the currency of their university affiliations to get by in conversations. As though academia were a satellite constantly pinging, letting him know who and where he was. It wasn’t until he had come out of that life that he realized he had no real way of relating to people without it. People looked at him differently when he didn’t mention that he’d once been a student or that he had a university affiliation. They looked through him, but the worst part of it was that he sometimes looked through himself in the same way. “You like it?” Charles asked. “It gives me time to think,” Lionel said. “It’s funny. I used to think so fast. Like, sometimes, I felt like I was having six different conversations in my head, all at once. But now it takes me a year just to get to the end of one thought.” “If I were that in my head, I’d kill myself,” Charles said. “Sounds awful. Jesus.” The acuity of the words stung Lionel right between the eyes. The air in the room was dense. His tongue felt heavy and numb. Something lodged at the base of his throat when he tried to respond. He coughed experimentally to see if he could clear it, but the hard knot of whatever it was remained stubbornly fixed.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I felt sorry for her. I thought she might really need my ten dollars. After all this was Saturday night, and yet she didn’t have any customers. Somehow I equated her fatness, her blackness, her unpopularity with my own outcast status. She’d show me sympathy, which would magically awaken my virility. In her adoring eyes I’d become a slender-hipped young prince under a gold crown of hair, skin as smooth as petals under a light green tunic. I’d protect her. I’d earn money and buy her freedom. We’d be outcasts together as a mixed couple, she a Negro whore and I her little protector. But no matter, for if this fantasy kept me a pariah by exchanging homosexuality for miscegenation, it also gave me a sacrifice to make and a companion to cherish. I would educate and protect her. I would nurse her back to decency after her years of debauchery. We went downstairs into a cellar room curtained off from the furnace by a flannel blanket suspended from a clothesline. Her night table was a wooden crate. Her mattress had no sheets on it and was resting on the floor. She pulled her slip over her head and said, “Get your clothes off. I don’ have all night.” She didn’t even watch me as I undressed. As I pulled my underpants off I worried she’d laugh when she saw my fear-shriveled penis, but her indifference to me was complete. I creaked awkwardly as I lowered myself onto the bed beside her. Her fingers started blindly grubbing for my penis, which she found and yanked. Then she sighed, heaved herself up onto an elbow, finally lowered herself and plopped my penis in her mouth. Nothing happened. I could scarcely feel anything. “I don’ have all night,” she said again as she unthreaded a hair from between her teeth and looked at it suspiciously. “Sorry,” I said. It dawned on me that neither of us was enjoying this and that she was as eager as I for it to be over. “For some reason I’m not in the mood tonight,” I said. “Let’s just talk a minute and then go upstairs. And if any of the fellows should ask—” “Yeah, yeah,” she said, “Ah’ll say you was great, a real stud. And in the future, my man, drink gin. Gin make you hard. It do. It make a man hard.”