Richard Jeffrey Newman

One of eight major works that can reliably be asc­ri­bed to Attar, Ilahi-Nama (Book of God or, some­ti­mes, Divine Book) has, accor­ding to Encyc­lo­pe­dia Ira­nica, been trans­la­ted once into English, by John A. Boyle in 1976, and once into French, by F. Rouhani in 1961. Four of Attar’s eight works—Ilahi-Nama is part of this sub­set — are mys­ti­cal narra­ti­ves, each one dea­ling with a dif­fe­rent aspect of Sufi thought and expe­rience. Ilahi-Nama’s sub­ject is zuhd, or asce­ti­cism, which Sufis unders­tand to mean a dis­ci­pli­ned stance of detach­ment and indif­fe­rence towards one’s desi­res so that one will not be ruled by them. This focus on the inte­rior world of human emo­tion dif­fe­ren­tia­tes Ilahi-Nama from the other of Attar’s poems with which it is often com­pa­red, Man­teq al-tayr (Con­fe­rence of the Birds), his best known work in English. The two poems are simi­lar in form (they are each frame sto­ries) and mes­sage (the key to enligh­ten­ment exists within each human being, not in the exter­nal world), but the fra­ming narra­tive of Man­teq al-tayr, an alle­gory about a group of birds in search of a king, is essen­tially a cri­ti­que of people’s need to find a mas­ter who will lead them on the path to true unders­tan­ding. Ilahi-Nama, on the other hand, is about lear­ning to mas­ter oneself.

The fra­ming narra­tive of Ilahi-Nama is about a caliph who asks his six sons what they desire most. The first son says he wants the daugh­ter of the king of the peris (fae­ries); the second wants to learn the art of magic; the third son desi­res Jamshid’s cup because it will reveal to him the sec­rets of the world; the fourth seeks the water of life; the fifth son covets the ring Solo­mon used to con­trol demons; and the sixth son wants to mas­ter alchemy. As each son gives his ans­wer, the father tells sto­ries to illus­trate, first, how sha­llow and mate­ria­lis­tic the son is for wan­ting what he wants and, second, how the son should unders­tand his desire so he can use it on the path to enligh­ten­ment. None of the sons, howe­ver, accept their father’s les­sons at face value, arguing that he has misun­ders­tood their desi­res and that the les­sons he wants them to learn, the­re­fore, are mis­gui­ded. When the father tells his first son what has come to be known as “The Tale of Mar­juma,” for exam­ple — about a beau­ti­ful and righ­teous woman who, after her hus­band lea­ves on pil­gri­mage to Mecca, must fend off a series of men who are so over­come with lust when they glimpse her beauty that they will stop at nothing to have her — the son accu­ses his father of wan­ting to eli­mi­nate sex. “God for­bid[!]” the father replies, explai­ning that “The Tale of Mar­juma” illus­tra­tes how sex, pro­perly com­prehen­ded and ente­red into, is a first step on the path to enlightenment:

But when your desire achie­ves apotheo­sis,
sex gives birth to a love without limits;
and when this love is pushed by pas­sion to the edge
of its strength, spi­ri­tual love emer­ges; and when
spi­ri­tual love can grow no further, your soul
will vanish into the Beloved’s end­less­ness. (My translation)

Given that the sur­face of the narra­tive in “The Tale of Mar­juma” feels more like a Perils-of-Pauline-type story in which the depra­ved and debauched men get their comeup­pance than one about the spi­ri­tual nature of sexua­lity, the son’s mis­rea­ding of the tale is an easy one to fall into. Such a rea­ding, howe­ver, fails to account for, among other things, the fact that not all the men who try to pos­sess the woman give in to their desi­res without a strug­gle. They are, in other words, neither evil nor merely sla­ves to their desi­res; they are human and fla­wed and, more to the point, they are, in the end, able and willing to repent. Indeed, they must repent, for God has punished them with a paraly­sis from which — in an irony that is at the core of the story’s mea­ning — they can be hea­led only by con­fes­sing to the woman everything they did to her. » Read the rest of this entry «

I ori­gi­nally pos­ted this in res­ponse to a con­ver­sa­tion about rape that was hap­pe­ning over at Alas, A Blog about rape, spe­ci­fi­cally about why some women have a hard time recog­ni­zing rape as rape. Something about that con­ver­sa­tion – I don’t remem­ber what, and I don’t really feel the need to go back and read through the entire thread – made me think of the first time I had sex and how coming to terms with that expe­rience rai­sed for me some really inte­res­ting ques­tions that, while abso­lu­tely derai­ling in a thread about women and rape, were nonethe­less impor­tant to think about. This has been, con­sis­tently, the most popu­lar post on the older ver­sion of It’s All Con­nec­ted, and so I am repos­ting it, with some small edits, here.

I lost my vir­gi­nity when I was six­teen with the eighteen-year-old girl who lived on the first floor of the buil­ding next to my grandmother’s. As soon as our rela­tionship star­ted to become phy­si­cal — and this was my first sexual rela­tionship ever — I asked her if she was a vir­gin. She told me yes. I told her I was as well and that I wan­ted to stay that way. My posi­tion had nothing to do with morals. I knew myself, and I knew that I was not ready for the level of inti­macy or the risk of unwan­ted preg­nancy that inter­course repre­sen­ted. She told me that she felt the same way, and so our phy­si­cal rela­tionship con­sis­ted of all the things you can do without losing your vir­gi­nity. One time, howe­ver, as she was making love to me, she clim­bed on top of me, and by the time I unders­tood what was hap­pe­ning, I was inside her and both the power of the phy­si­cal sen­sa­tion, which was overwhel­ming, and my own con­fu­sion, which was overwhel­ming as well, made it impos­si­ble for me to find a place within myself from which to tell her to stop or to push her off me.

I did not like how empty I felt when we were finished, and I told her so. I had thought – assu­ming we’d deci­ded that we wan­ted to be each other’s first – that we would plan the loss of our vir­gi­ni­ties, and so I figu­red that the sex had hap­pe­ned because we’d each, sepa­ra­tely, got­ten carried away in the moment. I knew that nothing in the way I’d beha­ved would have sig­ni­fied to her anything other than my enthu­sias­tic par­ti­ci­pa­tion, so I was not trying to accuse her of anything. Still, I was disap­poin­ted that my first expe­rience of inter­course was one I had not wan­ted to take place. I told her this as well, assu­ming that since she too was a vir­gin, she would at least unders­tand how I felt, even if she did not feel quite the same way. What I wan­ted, in other words, was to talk about what had hap­pe­ned, to make sense of it in a way that would bridge the gap that, to me at least, had ope­ned bet­ween us. My friend, howe­ver, res­pon­ded in a way that shut that pos­si­bi­lity down pretty much com­ple­tely. If I hadn’t wan­ted to have sex, she told me, I should have told her to stop. Besi­des, who did I think I was kid­ding? I was no dif­fe­rent from any other guy. The only rea­son I’d said I didn’t want to have sex was that I was afraid I wouldn’t know how to do it right. » Read the rest of this entry «

I was not plan­ning to start pos­ting again until I could begin in ear­nest the series I want to do on clas­si­cal Ira­nian lite­ra­ture – and inte­rrup­tion after inte­rrup­tion after inte­rrup­tion has kept me from get­ting to the point where I am ready to do that – but something hap­pe­ned this week rela­ting to a for­mer stu­dents of mine that I need to write about. It is actually quite urgent, pro­bably not to anyone who reads this blog, but cer­tainly to the woman whose mes­sage is at the root of this post, and it makes a point that can­not be made strongly or fre­quently enough: We, espe­cially but not only those of us who have sur­vi­ved sexual abuse of any kind and are strong enough to do so, need, need, need, need, need to speak up loudly and often about the rea­li­ties of that abuse and how it has sha­ped our lives (because, whether we rea­lize it or not, it sha­pes the lives even of those of us who have not been abu­sed, either because we know someone who has or because it sha­pes the cul­ture in which we live.) You may have seen this post in which I put up a You­Tube video of an inter­view I gave to Jack­son Heights Poetry Fes­ti­val, an orga­ni­za­tion on whose advi­sory board I sit. In the inter­view, I talk about the rela­tionship bet­ween my expe­rience of child sexual abuse and the fact that I became a poet. The subs­tance of what I said there is not impor­tant here. What is impor­tant is that watching this video moved a for­mer stu­dent of mine to send me a mes­sage in which she told me – and the tone of the mes­sage sug­gests that I am the first per­son she has told – that she was sodo­mi­zed a cou­ple of years ago and had been trying to deal with it by pre­ten­ding it didn\‘t hap­pen. Even more impor­tantly, though, and more urgently, she said that she sus­pects her three-year-old daugh­ter is being sexually abu­sed at the girl\‘s father\‘s house and that she [my for­mer stu­dent] freaks out just thin­king about the pos­si­bi­lity. As I read the mes­sage, it soun­ded to me like she was saying this frea­king out keeps her from acting on what she intuits, which is scary, because even if it turns out she is wrong – and there was no indi­ca­tion in the mes­sage that she has any vin­dic­ti­ve­ness towards the girl\‘s father that would lead her to make a false accu­sa­tion (my point being that she might be wrong in good faith) – she needs to tell some­body, first to make sure that her daugh­ter is safe and, second, to alle­viate her own anxie­ties (and maybe unders­tand, if she is wrong, what trig­ge­red her unfoun­ded sus­pi­cions in the first place).

I res­pon­ded in all the pre­dic­ta­ble ways – than­king her for her trust, ack­now­le­ding the cou­rage it took for her to speak out, and encou­ra­ging her to get in touch with someone about her daughter\‘s sita­tion, though since I was run­ning out the door, I couldn\‘t take the time to look up cri­sis hot­li­nes or other phone num­bers – and I am hoping to hear back from her, but what her mes­sage made me think about was, as I said above, just how impor­tant it is for us as a society to talk openly about the rea­lity of sexual abuse. More, though, it made me think about how impor­tant it is to talk about that rea­lity not just in con­texts where sexual abuse is the topic – i.e., talk shows, con­fe­ren­ces, semi­nars, etc. that are set aside for the spe­ci­fic pur­pose of addres­sing sexual abuse – but also, simply, merely, in the con­texts of our daily lives, because abuse is always already part of our daily lives. Because you never know who is lis­te­ning and how impor­tant your words might be to them.

I am remem­be­ring as I write this something that I have writ­ten about before, that I was not even thin­king about when I star­ted, but that is worth tal­king about here: An inde­pen­dent study I did five or seven years ago with two women who told me they wan­ted spe­ci­fi­cally to work on per­so­nal essays that dealt with the sexual abuse they had expe­rien­ced when they were girls. They were both in a crea­tive non­fic­tion class I was teaching and one had writ­ten an essay about her abuse that, while obviously cathar­tic for her, wor­ked neither as a public docu­ment of per­so­nal tes­ti­mony nor as art, and it was art she was trying to create. The pro­blems in the essay were indi­ca­tive of the dif­fi­cul­ties abuse sur­vi­vors have spea­king out about their expe­rience. Under nor­mal class­room cir­cums­tan­ces, I handle this by direc­ting the stu­dent to some exam­ples of wri­ters who had dealt with simi­lar topics; I might have a kind of \“the­ra­peu­tic\” con­ver­sa­tion (and I put that word in quo­tes because I do not mean that I would try to do the­rapy) to explore whether or not the stu­dent was really willing and able to delve into the topic at the depth and level of com­ple­xity it requi­red. (I do, after all, have to assign a grade to the work my stu­dents hand me, and the last thing I would want is to give a low grade to an essay in which someone is strug­gling to come to terms with, or even just to name, the sexual abuse they\‘d sur­vi­ved because they were not yet able to write about the expe­rience at the college level.) If the ans­wer is no, then I offer the stu­dent the chance to write about something else; if the ans­wer is yes, then I try to get them to arti­cu­late some of the dif­fi­cul­ties they were having in wri­ting the paper as a means of tal­king about how to deal with them in wri­terly terms; and I always encou­rage such stu­dents, if they are not in the­rapy, to seek counseling.

The woman in my crea­tive non­fic­tion class, howe­ver, was not simply ful­fi­lling an assign­ment I had given. She wan­ted to be a wri­ter and she told me quite expli­citly that she saw me as a role model, and so I was faced with the deci­sion of whether to share with her my own expe­rience of trying to write crea­ti­vely, to make art, out of the fact that I had sur­vi­ved child sexual abuse. For rea­sons that are not so rele­vant here, I deci­ded to do so. Then, when a second woman in the class also began to write about her expe­rience of child sexual abuse, and she told me that she too wan­ted to be a wri­ter, and she was a dam­ned good wri­ter, when the first woman approached me about doing an inde­pen­dent study, I sug­ges­ted that the two of them might work together. The story of that inde­pen­dent study is really quite remar­ka­ble, but the part of it that is rele­vant here is this: At the end of the semes­ter, all inde­pen­dent study stu­dents at my college are requi­red to pre­sent their work at a collo­quium; if they don\‘t, they don\‘t get cre­dit. As the day of the collo­quium drew near, my stu­dents grew inc­rea­singly ner­vous, for all of the pre­dic­ta­ble rea­sons, but one that stood out was their con­cern that the faculty and admi­nis­tra­tors pre­sent would think the sub­ject of their work inap­pro­priate for an aca­de­mic con­text. So I told my stu­dents that I would intro­duce them by tal­king about my own expe­rience of abuse and how mea­ning­ful it had been to me to be for them the kind of mentor/role model that just was not avai­la­ble to me in the 1980s when I star­ted to talk about my own abuse. At that time, peo­ple were just star­ting to recog­nize the sexual abuse of girls. No one, as fas as I know, as tal­king in any subs­tan­tive way – or at least was being given a forum to talk in any subs­tan­tive way – about the fact that boys were being sexually abu­sed as well.

And that\‘s what I did: I intro­du­ced those two women by naming myself as a sur­vi­vor of sexual abuse and telling a little bit of my own story. It was a watershed moment in my life and in my career as a teacher. Not that I had any pro­blem tal­king about my abuse, but I had always kept that part of my life sepa­rate from my pro­fes­sio­nal life. It was \“per­so­nal,\” and so I had not really thought much about the degree to which it infor­med my prac­tice as a teacher and a wri­ter, my poli­ti­cal stan­ces in the world, etc. and so on. There is a great deal more to say about what it has meant to me to inte­grate these parts of myself, and I will, I hope write more about that. What I want to say here is simply that, if it were not for that inde­pen­dent study and the women who wor­ked with me that semes­ter, I would never have tal­ked in that inter­view about the rela­tionship bet­ween my abuse and my beco­ming a wri­ter as easily as I did, and I would never have had the chance to encou­rage my for­mer stu­dent to act on her fee­lings about her daughter\‘s situa­tion, and my encou­ra­ge­ment might turn out to be the thing that moves her to act, and we all know what kind of dif­fe­rence that could make in her daughter\‘s life (if she is being abu­sed), and in my for­mer student\‘s life as well.

Where I lived in the early 1970s, sixth grade was when boys got to see the movie – or maybe it was a narra­ted film strip with line dra­wings – about erec­tions, noc­tur­nal emis­sions, mens­trual periods and such (girls got to see it in fifth grade). Seventh grade, if I remem­ber correctly, was when they star­ted teaching about sex itself, which I assume would have inc­lu­ded a dis­cus­sion of birth con­trol, though I am not sure, since a paper­work mix-up pla­ced me in the health class that did not inc­lude sex edu­ca­tion. So I know I did not learn about birth con­trol there; nor, I am equally sure, did I learn about it in the yeshiva I star­ted atten­ding when I was in eighth grade, where the only classroom-based “sex edu­ca­tion” I remem­ber recei­ving was in Rabbi W’s all-boy gemara class. He would preach at us week after week about the evils of co-ed dan­cing – it was the sea­son of sweet 16 par­ties for the girls – and explain how it ine­vi­tably lead to unwan­ted tee­nage preg­nancy. (The boys and girls watch each other dan­cing, you see, and then they want to slow dance, and so they are touching each other, and then one thing leads to another and, soo­ner or later they find some­place dark, and before you know it, her belly is big and both their lives are rui­ned.) My class­ma­tes and I tal­ked about sex, of course, but since none of us were even thin­king about actually having it, what we tal­ked about ten­ded to be theo­re­ti­cal and had little do with prac­ti­ca­li­ties like pre­ven­ting an unwan­ted preg­nancy. Three inci­dents of such tal­king stand out in my memory, from 8^th, 9^th and 10^th gra­des respectively.

I first lear­ned about the baseball-diamond-as-metaphor-for-sex in 8^th grade, because the big ques­tion was whether or not, at someone’s bar mitz­vah to which I had not been invi­ted, Robert “got to second” with Sha­ron over or under the shirt. “Over or under,” of course, was a huge ques­tion, one that my class­ma­tes pon­de­red at great length, won­de­ring why she would let him get that far, how cool it was that he could get her to let him get that far; or maybe he didn’t have to do all that much per­sua­ding, maybe under­neath the “good girl” image that Sha­ron so care­fully cul­ti­va­ted was a whole other per­son that those of us who knew her only in school had never met; and did this make her a “slut,” and how, pre­ci­sely, did get­ting that far, did her let­ting him get that far, obli­gate him to her in terms of com­mit­ment; and what the hell – some peo­ple were smart enough to ask – did com­mit­ment mean in ninth grade anyway?

I could not ima­gine why what Robert and Sha­ron did or did not do with each other was anyone else’s busi­ness, nor did I think that the ques­tion of when a girl step­ped over the line and became a “slut” was anything other than stu­pid, but I was new to the school, though, which meant no one thought my opi­nion mat­te­red very much, and so I was almost never inc­lu­ded in these con­ver­sa­tions. Still, I do remem­ber one time that I spoke up, asking – in res­ponse to I don’t remem­ber what – some far-less-articulate ver­sion of the follo­wing ques­tions: The whole point of touching a girl’s breasts is to bring her plea­sure, right? What is wrong with Sha­ron wan­ting that plea­sure or with Robert wan­ting to give it to her? And why are we tal­king about it like Robert was run­ning bases and Sha­ron was pla­ying (inef­fec­tive) defense? You make it sound like sex is a com­pe­ti­tion that the girl has to pre­tend to lose, just a little bit at a time, in order for both peo­ple to get what they want.

I was not naïve. I knew that boys did in fact put “notches on their bed­posts” depen­ding on how far they got with any par­ti­cu­lar girl, and I unders­tood that girls who went too far put that hard-to-pin-down thing called their repu­ta­tion at great risk. I knew these things, howe­ver, as facts, and while I accep­ted them as infor­ma­tion I nee­ded to know about how the world wor­ked, I did not really unders­tand them, and, more to the point, I did not like them. Any­way, no one said anything when I was finished tal­king. All I have is a pic­ture of my class­ma­tes’ faces tur­ned towards me in a momen­tary, non-comprehending stare, and then they tur­ned back towards each other and con­ti­nued tal­king in the terms that were rele­vant to them.

The second talking-about-sex moment that I remem­ber from yeshiva hap­pe­ned when I was in 9^th. The boys in my class were sche­du­led to take a trip to the very famous Lake­wood Yeshiva in New Jer­sey. I don’t remem­ber why I didn’t go, but I was the only boy in my grade in school that day, and so, since our reli­gious clas­ses were all can­ce­led – it would not have occu­rred to the admi­nis­tra­tion to send me to class with the girls – I spent the mor­ning shoo­ting hoops in the gym. (The day was split: reli­gious clas­ses in the mor­ning, secu­lar clas­ses in the after­noon.) After lunch, the girls and I deci­ded we would cut clas­ses for the rest of the day. After all, how much teaching would go on with more than half the class mis­sing? So we went out to the back of the school, where one of the girls pulled out a copy of the Ann Lan­ders sex test that had recently been published in one of the local news­pa­pers. (What looks like the ver­sion of the test that the girls and I were tal­king about, can, if you’re willing to wade through some reli­gious self-righteousness, be found here.)

We cut our first period class, which might have been math, tal­king and laughing about what was, for most of us at the time, the enti­rely theo­re­ti­cal nature of the items on the test; and we were doing abso­lu­tely nothing that would have been con­si­de­red inap­pro­priate anywhere other than an ortho­dox yeshiva, where the sim­ple fact of our being alone together was cause for con­cern. Because of what could hap­pen – remem­ber Rabbi W’s worries over co-ed dan­cing – if we lost con­trol of our­sel­ves. Because of how, even though we were doing nothing but tal­king, it would look to an outsi­der that we are alone together in the first place. Then, just as second period English was about to begin, one of the girls who had gone inside to use the bath­room came run­ning out to tell us that the boys were had retur­ned. Appa­rently, they had stop­ped to get a bles­sing from Rabbi Moshe Feins­tein, one of the most impor­tant rab­bis of the 20^th cen­tury. He gave them the bles­sing, they got back in their bus to go to Lake­wood, and the bus broke down, for­cing them to return to school. We ran into the buil­ding, rushed ups­tairs and, remar­kably, made it to second period English on time, though it was only a few minu­tes into Mrs. Lynch’s les­son before Rabbi S burst into the class­room, poin­ted one by one to each of the girls and said, “You! Out!”

When he did not point to me, I thought perhaps I had esca­ped detec­tion, but he came back a few minu­tes later, flung the door open with the same law-enforcement air about him, poin­ted to me and said, “You too!”

We were sus­pen­ded, the girls and I, not only for cut­ting class, and not only because the idea of one boy and twelve girls han­ging out alone in the back of the school was unseemly, but also, and to some admi­nis­tra­tors most impor­tantly, because we had been tal­king about sex. When we were told that, before we’d be allo­wed back into class, our parents would have to come in to speak per­so­nally with Rabbi S, who was only avai­la­ble in the after­noons, I had to ask if my mother, since she wor­ked, could come in the mor­ning to speak with Rabbi F, the dean of the school. You would have thought that spea­king to the Dean would be more serious than spea­king to the prin­ci­pal of secu­lar stu­dies, but when my mother came in, all Rabbi F said was, “Mrs. Lou­ras [her name from her second marriage], Richard is a real mensch, a won­der­ful boy. He made a terri­ble mis­take, but we’re sure he’ll never do it again.” That was it. He and my mother exchan­ged some plea­san­tries, told me to go back to my class, and wished her a good rest of the day. My mother, who couldn’t ima­gine why they were making such a big deal out of the whole situa­tion, collap­sed laughing against the wall just outside the school entrance. “Remind me,” she said, “Why were you sus­pen­ded again?” (To be fair, it’s not that my mother did not think I should be punished  for cut­ting class, but she could not ima­gine that I was being sus­pen­ded for a first offense or that the “real” pro­blem, as it had been explai­ned to her, was that I’d been alone with the girls and that we were tal­king about sex.)

I find it hard to believe that Rabbi F did not say more because he did not know why I had been sus­pen­ded; nor do I think he did not con­si­der my “offense” a very serious one. Most likely, he was just uncom­for­ta­ble tal­king about such things with a woman, espe­cially a woman like my mother, who in her jeans and one-button-too-many-undone but­ton down shirt, her long denim frock coat and her afro, did not at all fit the image of the nice, middle-class Jewish mother with whom he was used to dea­ling. He never said anything else about the inci­dent to me, either, but an inci­dent that sticks in my head as somehow con­nec­ted this epi­sode took place later that year. Rabbi F pulled me aside one day while my class was in the library and, spea­king very softly, indi­ca­ted with this chin a new girl in the class whose boy­friend ever­yone knew was not Jewish. (Indeed, it had been the boy­friend who encou­ra­ged her to go to yeshiva so she could learn about her heri­tage.) He said something about her being a very nice girl, and attrac­tive, and how it was a shame that she was dating a non-Jewish boy. Maybe – and I wish I could remem­ber the exact words he used, because I remem­ber thin­king even at the time how abso­lu­tely pre­cious his phra­sing was – I could get friendly with her, not too friendly, mind you, but friendly enough that she would see just how much Jewish boys had to offer her. I refu­sed, of course, and I think this may be the first time I am telling this story to anyone.

Years after I left the yeshiva, I found out that I had  had, among my class­ma­tes, a mostly unde­ser­ved repu­ta­tion for having a great deal more expe­rience with sex and drugs than I actually did. Partly this repu­ta­tion came from the fact that I did indeed know more about sex and drugs than my class­ma­tes, and peo­ple  just assu­med that if I knew about it, I must have done it. The truth is, though, that I just hap­pe­ned at the time to have a group of friends at home – the kind my class­ma­tes’ parents would pro­bably keep their kids away from – who spoke openly about the drugs they did and the sex they had. By the time I was in ele­venth grade, howe­ver, when the next con­ver­sa­tion about sex that I want to tell you about hap­pe­ned, this repu­ta­tion of mine was at least a little more deser­ved. I’d had sex for the first time and been foo­lish enough to tell one of my class­ma­tes, and I had come to school on the day that we took club pic­tu­res for our year­book with a clearly visi­ble hic­key on my neck. I don’t remem­ber, frankly, if I knew the hic­key was there when I got dres­sed, but I do remem­ber being a little emba­rras­sed when someone poin­ted out to me that I might have thought to wear a turtle neck shirt or asked my mother to cover it up with makeup. Any­way, in 11^th grade a group of girls cor­ne­red me in the hall one day during lunch, or maybe it was recess, and asked, without irony, “Richard, what’s a cli­to­ris?” I knew the ans­wer, though I’d never seen a cli­to­ris at that point in anything but a pho­to­graph. (I’d had sex but had not actually loo­ked much at my girlfriend’s vagina.) Still, I didn’t like being put on the spot. So I told them to go look it up. They did, and for some rea­son I have never unders­tood felt it neces­sary the next day to report back to me what they’d lear­ned: “It’s what your hus­band chews on when you do sixty-nine.”

I remem­ber thin­king, “Chews on?”

I had no real expe­rience at that point in my life with giving oral sex, but I did know from my rea­ding, and I had done some very exten­sive and eclec­tic rea­ding, that her cli­to­ris was not something a woman was likely to want a sexual part­ner lite­rally to chew on. I don’t remem­ber if I said anything in res­ponse, or if they tried to push the con­ver­sa­tion further, though now that I am thin­king about it, there was one other moment of infor­mal sex edu­ca­tion that I recei­ved in the yeshiva. For about two weeks, in 8^th grade, I “went out” with one of the girls in my class. Not that we did much actual “going” anywhere. We lived too far apart for that. Rather, “going out” was a sta­tus; we were a cou­ple; and when I told one of my friends at home that I had a girl­friend, his first ques­tion was, “Does she have big tits?”

In truth, I had no idea how big a girl’s breasts had to be to qua­lify as “big tits,” and I have no memory of whether this girl’s breasts were par­ti­cu­larly large or not; but I knew that I liked the way her body loo­ked – though I had only seen it clothed – and I knew that saying yes would score me points in the value sys­tem of the friend who asked, even though I did not quite unders­tand why the size of my girlfriend’s breasts mat­te­red so much to him (the same way I did not quite unders­tand the whole sys­tem of sex-as-baseball) but I wan­ted to score those points, and so I said yes, she did have “big tits.”

That night, when I was on the phone with my girl­friend, I told her what I had said. The anger with which she res­pon­ded shoc­ked me, and when I think back now to how naïve I was – it really never occu­rred to me that she would think I had done anything other than say something nice about her to one of my friends – I cringe. She broke up with me a week later, saying that she’d only said yes when I asked her out so as not to hurt my feelings.

///

I am trying to remem­ber what else I knew and did not know about sex at that time in my life. I think I knew what con­doms were, and birth con­trol pills, but I truly do not know when, or how, or by whom that know­ledge was given to me; and I know I did not learn about diaph­ragms or IUDs at least until I was in college. Not that the eclec­tic rea­ding I men­tio­ned above was inten­ded to edu­cate me about such things or that I really unders­tood the need for that kind of sex edu­ca­tion in the first place. Most of what I read came from my mother’s collec­tion of lite­rary por­no­graphy (lots of Vic­to­rian ero­tica, the Mar­quis de Sade, the pur­por­ted diary of one of Cathe­rine the Great’s maids), where little if any con­cern was given to whether or not the female cha­rac­ters got preg­nant; and, if they did, the preg­nancy was so clearly part of the por­no­graphy that the ques­tion of how one might have pre­ven­ted in never even ente­red into the picture. 

The sexual “rea­ding” that I really valued, howe­ver, were hard­core maga­zi­nes like Puri­tan and Prude. The pic­tu­res in Penthouse, Play­boy, Oui and other maga­zi­nes that focu­sed pretty much exc­lu­si­vely on the bodies of women quite frankly bored me. I wan­ted to see men and women actually put­ting ton­gues and fin­gers and peni­ses and wha­te­ver else they chose to use in and on each other. More spe­ci­fi­cally, I wan­ted to unders­tand in detail both what the men in those pic­tu­res did with their erec­tions when they had sex with women and what the women did when they had sex with men. It would be years before I unders­tood how pro­foundly limi­ted, and limi­ting, the reper­toire of beha­viors con­tai­ned in those pho­to­graphs was, and it would be even lon­ger before I unders­tood that no mat­ter how much I wan­ted to see a mutua­lity of desire and pur­pose in the peo­ple they depic­ted, those ima­ges – even when they con­tai­ned that mutua­lity of desire and pur­pose – were part of a social sys­tem that degra­ded women sexually and rele­ga­ted them to the sta­tus of fuc­ka­ble objects. 

There’s no mys­tery to why the hard­core porn of the time did not depict condom-use, just as there’s no mys­tery to why so much mains­tream hard­core porn does not depict it now. I’d like to focus on one pos­si­ble rea­son, though: intro­duce a con­dom into a scene and it makes visi­ble a sexual boun­dary the man can­not cross; it breaks, in other words, the illu­sion of unfet­te­red sex and of men’s unres­tric­ted sexual access to women that mains­tream hard­core hete­ro­se­xual porn is sup­po­sed to depict. Iro­ni­cally, howe­ver, what I lear­ned about con­tra­cep­tion – and remem­ber I lear­ned it when safe sex was pri­ma­rily about birth con­trol – rele­ga­ted women to the sta­tus of fuc­ka­ble objects no dif­fe­rently than por­no­graphy, though it did so in a far more subtle way, since it see­med to have at its core pre­ci­sely the oppo­site belief. Indeed, the ver­sion of male hete­ro­se­xual res­pon­si­bi­lity that I grew up with appea­red to be focu­sed enti­rely on res­pec­ting the inte­grity of a woman’s sexual boun­da­ries. That focus was con­tai­ned in two impe­ra­ti­ves: make sure you do not com­mit rape and make sure that she does not get preg­nant. Each of these impe­ra­ti­ves, of course, is one that men need to inter­na­lize, and there is a value in their bottom-line logic that I want neither to deni­grate nor deny. The fact is that too many men con­ti­nue to com­mit rape that they think is not rape because they think they are entit­led to the women they fuck; and too many men con­ti­nue to aban­don the women with whom they con­ceive chil­dren, as well as those chil­dren, because the corres­pon­ding res­pon­si­bi­li­ties inter­fere with that sense of entit­le­ment. Nonethe­less, “do not rape her” and “do not get her preg­nant,” at least in the bottom-line ver­sions I am tal­king about here, place the boun­da­ries of male hete­ro­se­xua­lity not within men but at the outer edge of women’s skin, and so they don’t essen­tially change the men-fuck-women-get-fucked equa­tion that is at the core of male domi­nant hete­ro­se­xual thinking.

Inte­res­tingly enough, espe­cially given that I star­ted out by tal­king about my days in yeshiva, the idea that women’s sexua­lity is what esta­blishes the boun­da­ries of men’s sexua­lity is expres­sed, among other pla­ces, in Jewish law. As Rachel Biale wri­tes in Women and Jewish Law: The Essen­tial Texts, Their His­tory, and Their Rele­vance for Today, “The ‘quiet,’ intro­ver­ted sexua­lity of the woman cir­cumsc­ri­bes the active, extro­ver­ted sexua­lity of the man. It beco­mes the cen­ter and regu­la­ting mecha­nism” of hete­ro­se­xual rela­tionships (146). “The active, extro­ver­ted sexua­lity of the man,” of course, is on the one hand nothing more than the male half of the tra­di­tio­nal view of sexua­lity that por­trays men as active and women as pas­sive; but it is also a euphe­mis­tic way of refe­rring to what Adrienne Rich meant when she tal­ked about the idea of the penis-with-a-life-of-its-own in her essay “Com­pul­sory Hete­ro­se­xua­lity and Les­bian Expe­rience,” the belief that male sexual desire is somehow beyond the con­trol of the man expe­rien­cing it, espe­cially, but not only, if he has an erec­tion. In the con­text of Jewish law, that penis gets “tamed” – or perhaps “domes­ti­ca­ted” is a bet­ter term – through gui­de­li­nes and requi­re­ments that direct a husband’s sexua­lity towards his wife – because in a reli­gious con­text, of course, mari­tal sex is the only legi­ti­mate sex – requi­ring him to be atten­tive to her needs and desi­res, while at the same time ensu­ring that there is enough sex for him to be satis­fied. The reli­gious obli­ga­tion, howe­ver, is for him to satisfy her; she bears no corres­pon­ding onus – except that she not refuse him unrea­so­nably. The assump­tion here seems to be that a hus­band will satisfy his own sexual desi­res and needs, by defi­ni­tion, in the pro­cess of satisf­ying his wife’s. His desi­res and needs, in other words, are so sim­ple and straight­for­ward that they do not require any spe­cial atten­tion. Since he is the one who is going to seek sex out – and, impli­citly, since his phy­si­cal satis­fac­tion is so easy to accom­plish and con­firm – as long as he gets the sex he seeks, he will be happy.

In gene­ral, the bot­tom line ver­sion of “do not rape her” that I men­tio­ned above sha­res this assump­tion, using a focus on the needs and desi­res of women – this time, the very basic ques­tion of whether a woman wants to have sex in the first place – to rein in men’s more “active” and “extro­ver­ted” sexua­lity. Things may be dif­fe­rent now, but the “do not rape her” edu­ca­tion that I recei­ved when I was youn­ger, and I am thin­king here spe­ci­fi­cally of the anti-rape edu­ca­tion I recei­ved in college, asked me nothing about my own desi­res and needs. No one, for exam­ple, wan­ted to know if there were cir­cums­tan­ces under which I might not want to have sex or if I had ever thought more deeply about my desire for sex than she-turns-me-0n-it-feels-good-so-I-want-it. Gran­ted, these ques­tions can all too easily become ways of not tal­king about not raping women; they open the door to the kinds of tit-for-tat accu­sa­tions that not only derail mea­ning­ful dis­cus­sion about rape–See! Men also have sex when we don’t want to, but we don’t go around crying rape every time it hap­pens–but not to ask them is ulti­ma­tely to impo­ve­rish any con­ver­sa­tion we might have about men’s rela­tionship to our own bodies, about the con­nec­tion bet­ween our sexua­lity and our fer­ti­lity (because not wan­ting to con­ceive a child should be as unpro­ble­ma­tic a rea­son for a man not to fuck as it is for a woman) and about our own sexual plea­sure. Because not asking those ques­tions, and the many ques­tions like them that could be asked, lea­ves in place both the cen­tra­lity of geni­tal fuc­king as an expres­sion of hete­ro­se­xual manhood and the notion that eja­cu­la­ting inside a woman is the ulti­mate and only truly mea­ning­ful expres­sion and expe­rience avai­la­ble to us of male heterosexuality.

The first poem I ever published was cho­sen by my best friend Adrienne to be inc­lu­ded in our 9^th grade year­book. I called it “Alone.”

Alone, always alone,
Sta­ring always sta­ring,
Out of a win­dow,
Never lea­ving it.
Watching chil­dren,
And remem­be­ring,
Yes, always remem­be­ring,
What it was like,
When you were young,
Alone, always alone.

Adrienne was the yearbook’s lite­rary edi­tor, and I still remem­ber the anxiety I felt when she told me she’d cho­sen this poem to publish. Indeed, when I read this poem now, I can still remem­ber how deeply pain­ful the lone­li­ness it desc­ri­bes was to me and the con­vic­tion that I was, somehow, somewhere inside myself, as old as the spea­ker of the poem sounds. I was sca­red of the res­pon­si­bi­lity entai­led in making the expe­rience in the poem avai­la­ble to anyone who wan­ted to read it. They could hold me accoun­ta­ble for what I’d writ­ten, ask me to explain myself, sub­ject my words to a kind of scru­tiny I asso­cia­ted with the cour­troom: Was I telling the truth in this poem or was I lying? I also remem­ber, though, the way that wri­ting the poem see­med to give subs­tance what was going on inside me, making it real to me in a way that I had never before felt real to myself, and I guess I was also afraid that this rea­lity was still too new and vul­ne­ra­ble to made public.

Then Adrienne told me about how the poem made her feel. (Unfor­tu­na­tely, I have no reco­llec­tion of what she said.) For the first time, someone I cared about was taking my wri­ting seriously as more than the pro­duct of an overly self-indulgent ado­les­cent mind. She thought I had something to say and that hel­ped give me the cou­rage to say it. It’s not that I think I would not have become a wri­ter without Adrienne’s sup­port, but it was lar­gely because Adrienne took my wri­ting seriously that I came to dis­co­ver the making of poems as a way not only of coming to terms with the life dif­fi­cul­ties I faced at the time, but also of crea­ting pos­si­bi­li­ties of being that had never before occu­rred to me.

I nee­ded those pos­si­bi­li­ties of being des­pe­ra­tely. I’m always a little reluc­tant to write about this part of how I became a poet because I still have some resi­dual fear, even after all these years of being a poet, that I will sound either like I should be baring my soul on a TV talk show or like I am trum­pe­ting the the­ra­peu­tic pos­si­bi­li­ties of poetry, and not like someone for whom beco­ming a poet was, conc­re­tely, and in ways I am still lear­ning about, a mat­ter of sur­vi­val. I don’t mean to sound high­fa­lu­tin. Simply put, wri­ting poetry taught me to believe I had a voice I could call my own, that because I could hear myself in my poems, and because — as I began to show my work to more and more peo­ple like my friend Adrienne — others could hear me as well, I was not, in the core of my being, the invi­si­ble boy I thought I was; and I thought I was invi­si­ble lar­gely because of the vio­lence and sexual abuse I suf­fe­red at the time.

Perhaps unders­tan­dably, vio­lence and abuse, sexua­lity and gen­der, our  bodies and how we live in them, have all become cen­tral con­cerns of my work. I called my first book of poems The Silence Of Men because the silence I had to break in order to write poetry in the first place was the par­ti­cu­larly male one that makes it so dif­fi­cult indi­vi­dually and cul­tu­rally for men to speak honestly about pre­ci­sely those cen­tral con­cerns. In 2002, I gave a talk in New York City as part of a panel at The Sophia Cen­ter on poetry and spi­ri­tua­lity in which I spoke more dis­cur­si­vely about the rela­tionship bet­ween and among the sexual abuse I sur­vi­ved, my wri­ting and my own spi­ri­tua­lity. I don’t want to repeat here what I have already said in that piece, which is called “The Rec­ti­fi­ca­tion Of Names,” but you can read it here on my blog if you’re interested.

In 1990, I published a poem in Five Fin­gers Review #8/9 called “To Carve A Shape Through Silence.” It was my first attempt to write about my friend Joey’s sui­cide and to con­nect my grief at his death to how I felt about — or, rather, to trying to figure out how I felt about — my father and the fact that he was no lon­ger a part of my life, and then to con­nect those two emo­tio­nal expe­rien­ces to my wri­ting. There are two strophes from that poem that have sta­yed with me, and I sup­pose that, together, they form a kind of ars poe­tica. Here is the first one:

Wri­ting is like that. These lines
on the page, the sound
I ima­gine of my lan­guage
in the hollow of your ears,
how a sen­tence never dies, but seeps
into us, until,
like soil, we turn it out again,
use­ful and alive.

And here is the second one:

Lear­ning to write poems
has been easier than loving peo­ple
and har­der than coun­ting sylla­ble.
But words grow
and sen­ten­ces shape
time into mea­ning, and lear­ning
to let that hap­pen
has been lear­ning to shape my body
(and I am my body)
into somewhere I can live.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Update: I have deci­ded to take the text of this post down until I have a chance to revise and repost it. The com­ments the post has recei­ved at Alas have con­vin­ced me that, as I said in com­ment #19, my words are both con­ju­ring things I do not intend and fai­ling to make dis­tinc­tions that I do intend, and this weak­ness in the wri­ting means that what I want to say, the ques­tions I want to ask and explore are not only not get­ting across, but are being mis­re­pre­sen­ted. It’s not so much that I think the revi­sion will change the mind of any­body who has pos­ted a cri­ti­cal com­ment, but that, at least, the cri­ti­cism will be direc­ted at what I actually mean to say, not the unin­ten­ded impli­ca­tions of my having said it not as well as I should have. Hope­fully, I will have that revi­sion up within the next week or so.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

The stu­dents in a reme­dial com­po­si­tion class I’m teaching during my second semes­ter as a college pro­fes­sor are rea­ding aloud and com­men­ting on fables they’ve writ­ten over the wee­kend. The prose is awk­ward and ungram­ma­ti­cal, but I’m impres­sed with the ima­gi­na­tive effort some have made. There’s a moder­ni­zed ver­sion of Little Red Riding Hood set in an upper class neigh­borhood with the most sought-after senior boy in the local high school taking the part of the wolf. There’s also a gender-reversed Slee­ping Beauty in which Prin­cess Char­ming turns out to be the home­less woman who sleeps in the park. I’m about to move on to the next part of the les­son when Wal­ter, who’d announ­ced when we began that he wasn’t going to read, asks if we’d like to hear his story. Yes, I say, of course.

At the cen­ter of Walter’s narra­tive, which takes place far in the future, is a very power­ful drug lord whose orga­ni­za­tion has been infil­tra­ted by a top female nar­co­tics agent posing as a pros­ti­tute. When the dealer’s lover, who is also a pros­ti­tute in his sta­ble, learns that the ope­ra­tion has been com­pro­mi­sed, she tells him imme­dia­tely. The dea­ler con­cei­ves a plan that uses his lover to expose the spy, who is then tor­tu­red slowly to death. To express his gra­ti­tude, the dea­ler takes his lover to be, giving her, in Walter’s words, “the lite­ral fuck of her life, poun­ding away until she was no lon­ger breathing.” The story ends with a desc­rip­tion of the lavish fune­ral the dea­ler gives her.

When Wal­ter finishes rea­ding, he looks around the circle with a sar­cas­tic and self-satisfied grin. The rest of the class is silent; no one except me is willing to meet his eyes, but I am hoping that one of his class­ma­tes will speak first, con­dem­ning what he’s writ­ten not in the voice of autho­rity – which my voice ine­vi­tably will be – but in the voice of his peers. A minute pas­ses in silence before it beco­mes clear that his fellow stu­dents don’t intend to res­pond, and so I call on a few stu­dents by name, male and female, to see if I can draw them out. The men all say the story is “sick,” while the women tell me they it’s not worth res­pon­ding to. To me, though, a res­ponse feels abso­lu­tely neces­sary. Wal­ter, like all the other stu­dents in the class, is just out of high school. I do not want to let pass what seems to me to be real teacha­ble moment, and so I ask Wal­ter if he really belie­ves that fuc­king a woman to death could be an expres­sion of gratitude.

“Abso­lu­tely,” he says, without a hint of irony in his voice. “For the woman it’s the ulti­mate ful­fill­ment, and for the man it’s the ulti­mate proof.”

“Of what?” I ask him.

“Of manhood.” His tone indi­ca­tes that he’s sur­pri­sed I even have to ask. “Women would buy tic­kets and stand in line to be with a man power­ful enough to fuck them like that.” He says these words with a con­vic­tion I at first can’t think how to coun­ter, but then I won­der aloud if he would inc­lude his girl­friend or his future wife in that line of women.

“I’m not tal­king,” he says, “about doing this to someone I love. I’m tal­king about the pie­ces of trash you can pick up in the local bar, the sluts who give it away, the hoo­kers who do it for money. Women who are asking for it.”

“Why do they deserve to be mur­de­red?” I ask.

“They’re who­res,” he res­ponds. “No one cares about them.”

I take a dif­fe­rent tack, asking him if he’s ever killed anything other than an insect. When he says no, I ask him if he rea­li­zes that he’s tal­king about using his own body, his penis spe­ci­fi­cally, as a mur­der weapon.

“Yes, I do,” he says.

So I ask if he makes a dis­tinc­tion bet­ween the sex he would have for plea­sure – pre­su­mably with a woman he loves – and the power he says he would like to expe­rience using sex to kill. Wal­ter looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Power,” he says, “is pleasure.”

Class ends. As I’m put­ting my papers in my brief­case, Wal­ter steps up to my desk. “Now that ever­yone else is gone,” he says, his voice full of cons­pi­ra­to­rial cama­ra­de­rie, “come on, be honest. Wouldn’t it be great to take some slut to a hotel and then meet your bud­dies later and tell them you killed her with your dick?”

“No,” is all I can think to say.

“Sure, okay, maybe now that you’re older and you can’t get it up like you used to, but when you were youn­ger, when you were an under­gra­duate, wasn’t fuc­king something you did so you could share it with your bud­dies and impress them, and wouldn’t they have worship­ped you if you told them you’d fuc­ked someone to death?”

Since it’s even more clear now than it was during class that Wal­ter is less inte­res­ted in really enga­ging the ideas he is espou­sing than in “outing” me as “one of the boys,” I decide that monosy­lla­bic ans­wers are the best way to deal with him. “No,” I say again.

Wal­ter waits a few seconds for me to say more. When I don’t, he mut­ters something under his breath of which I think I hear the words pathe­tic and excuse, and he walks out, and that’s the lest I see or hear of him until I get my final ros­ter with a W for with­dra­wal next to his name.

///

The encoun­ter I have just desc­ri­bed took place more than fif­teen years ago. In the seve­ral years imme­dia­tely follo­wing my dis­cus­sion with Wal­ter, I often sha­red what he’d said with my friends and collea­gues, male and female, and I always found it inte­res­ting that their res­pon­ses fell, for the most part, along the same lines as my stu­dents’ res­pon­ses did. On the one hand were those who dis­mis­sed Wal­ter as “crazy,” wha­te­ver they meant by that term (and some sug­ges­ted that he really ought to be ins­ti­tu­tio­na­li­zed), and, on the other hand, there were those who saw him as not worth the energy it would to res­pond to him in the first place. The ease with which these res­pon­ses were almost always given, howe­ver, always left me a little uncom­for­ta­ble, because it see­med – and still seems – to me that each of those ans­wers too easily dis­mis­ses the ques­tion of how Wal­ter came to feel the way he did in favor of a very glib unders­tan­ding of who he must be based on what he said. Yet it is pre­ci­sely the ques­tion of how that haun­ted me most, and that I think con­ti­nues to be something men don’t talk about enough, not because I think ans­we­ring it lets Wal­ter off the hook, but because the inte­rior expe­rience Wal­ter clai­med to have /desire of his own geni­tals, of my geni­tals too, as a wea­pon feels as inac­ces­si­ble to me as the inte­rior expe­rience of bio­lo­gi­cal femaleness.

///

One of the let­ters from Penthouse maga­zine – I think it was from the “Happy Hoo­ker” column – that has sta­yed with me since I first read it when I was a tee­na­ger was writ­ten by a woman who clai­med to be desc­ri­bing how she and a friend took revenge on a man who’d tried to rape the friend. The wri­ter of the let­ter arran­ged to meet the man at a disco, invi­ted him to her apart­ment, and sedu­ced him into being tied spread-eagled to her bed. Then the woman’s friend, who’d been wai­ting in another room, came in, and the two women tea­sed the man sexually until he was beg­ging them for release. In res­ponse, the women took out a razor and sha­ving cream, telling him that if he eja­cu­la­ted while they rub­bed his penis, the would shave all the hair from his body. The let­ter went on to desc­ribe in great detail first the man’s plea­ding with them not to do it and then his efforts to keep him­self from coming while the women took turns mas­tur­ba­ting him.
Finally, of course, he came, and the women sha­ved him, threa­te­ning to slice off his tes­tic­les if he didn’t lay still.

The woman’s let­ter desc­ri­bes a rape. She didn’t pre­sent it as anything else – except to make clear that it was moti­va­ted by revenge – and she never implied that the man enjo­yed what she and her friend did to him. Nonethe­less, my sexual ima­gi­na­tion was drawn to the story. For months, for years after­ward, I fan­ta­si­zed about women tying me to a bed and crea­ting in my flesh an arou­sal so all-encompassing that I too would be willing to beg for release. Yet no mat­ter how hard I tried to ima­gine a conc­lu­sion other than the one in the let­ter, I always ended up the vic­tim of some ver­sion of the revenge the wri­ter and her friend took. What I most iden­ti­fied with in this story, I think, what led me always away from the sce­na­rio I began with of trust in my ima­gi­ned lovers and the plea­sure they wan­ted to give me, was the man’s expe­rience of having the plea­su­res of his body tur­ned against him, for I knew I could be sha­med in that way as well, that my body was always the poten­tial source of my own defeat.

///

A simi­lar theme is pla­yed out in an epi­sode of the long-and-deservedly-defunct TV series She-Wolf of Lon­don. A very old man is brought into the hos­pi­tal dying of unk­nown cau­ses. The doc­tor on duty belie­ves the old man is either senile or insane because he keeps insis­ting he is actually twenty-seven years old and that he was tur­ned into an old man by a woman. As the doc­tor lea­ves, he orders a nurse to give the old man a seda­tive. Once the nurse and the old man are alone, howe­ver, she unzips her uni­form to reveal black-lace lin­ge­rie, and the old man recog­ni­zes her as the woman who has aged him – one of what the vie­wers will later learn is a group of suc­cu­bae who have ope­ned an escort ser­vice in England’s capi­tal city. As the old man looks on in hel­pless terror, the suc­cu­bus begins to climb into his hos­pi­tal bed, and, as she does so, she reminds him in the voice of a pre­da­tor enjo­ying the power­less­ness of its prey that all he has to do is not want her and he will be able to live. All he has to do is not have an erec­tion and she will not be able to fuck him to death.

///

The story Wal­ter wrote can be unders­tood as a kind of pre-emptive strike against the fear of women expres­sed in this scene, as well as in my res­ponse to the Penthouse let­ter I desc­ri­bed above. This unders­tan­ding is not the same thing, howe­ver, as kno­wing how Wal­ter and I – or at least I, since I can­not speak for Wal­ter – came to feel this fear in the first place, and I’m focu­sing here on the ques­tion of how rather than why because it seems to me that why has already been ans­we­red, autho­ri­ta­ti­vely and at length, by the women’s move­ment: Men fear the power of women’s freed, sexual and other­wise, because the power of women’s free­dom, sexual and other­wise, repre­sents the undoing of male domi­nant power and pri­vi­lege, with the corres­pon­ding collapse of the myth of male invul­ne­ra­bi­lity and the manhood men are expec­ted to achieve in order to per­pe­tuate that illusion.

Ack­now­led­ging this fear, obviously, is not the same thing as vali­da­ting the cul­ture of male domi­nance that pro­du­ces it. At the same time, howe­ver, not to ack­now­ledge the emo­tio­nal vali­dity to men of that culture’s exis­tence is to miss what I think is a cen­tral ques­tion that has to be asked, that men have to ask of our­sel­ves, if we want not to learn not to be afraid: When you con­si­der that pain, humi­lia­tion and/or sub­ju­ga­tion are almost always the con­se­quen­ces for a man who has fai­led in his manhood, is it any won­der that so many of us strive to use our bodies so that they can never be used against us?

///

A collea­gue with whom I used to have lunch on a regu­lar basis would occa­sio­nally bring her three-year-old son along. Usually, John was a very ani­ma­ted little boy, asking ques­tions, making a mess, and doing in gene­ral what three year old boys do to main­tain them­sel­ves as the focus of atten­tion. On this par­ti­cu­lar after­noon, howe­ver, John sat next to his mother in abso­lute silence. Both of his hands were ban­da­ged because of a fall he’d taken ear­lier in the day, and he was still in pain, which made it dif­fi­cult for him to hold the small pie­ces his mother cut for him from the pizza we’d just orde­red for lunch. From time to time, when the look of frus­tra­tion on her son’s face became espe­cially acute, my friend would stop our con­ver­sa­tion, pick up a small square of food and hold it to his mouth, not con­ti­nuing with what she’d been saying until he’d che­wed and swa­llo­wed the whole thing. When we were done, and John stood up so his mother could put his coat on, he held his engau­zed palms out to her, silently asking for com­fort. My friend squat­ted in front of her son and asked in a voice filled with empathy, “What’s the mat­ter John? Does it hurt?” When John nod­ded his head, she stro­ked his cheek with her fin­gers and said, “I know swee­tie, but you’re a man, right? You can take it.” John set his mouth in a firm, thin line, and he again moved his head up and down. Then his mother hel­ped him slip his arms into the slee­ves of his jac­ket, zip­ped him up and motio­ned to me that we were ready to leave.

As we wal­ked out, I thought of all the count­less times, and all the dif­fe­rent pain­ful and humi­lia­ting ways in which I was, in which John would be, in which boys rou­ti­nely are, asked or told, impli­citly or expli­citly, by both men and women, boys and girls, “to take it.” I’m not being melo­dra­ma­tic here. I have no doubt that my friend said what she said without even thin­king about it, and I don’t want to blow out of pro­por­tion this one clearly minor appeal to her son’s inci­pient man­li­ness. The fact is, howe­ver, that she could’ve hel­ped her son unders­tand that we can­not always expect peo­ple to com­fort us when we are in pain without put­ting his manhood at stake. Or, more to the point, she could have given him a hug without making any com­ment at all. (At the time this hap­pe­ned, I did not have a child; now that I do, well can I ima­gine that she might have been tired of a day’s worth of com­for­ting him, and all she wan­ted was a little break.) That she did not, that even in a situa­tion as insig­ni­fi­cant as this one, John’s manhood became an issue, howe­ver small, indi­ca­tes how deeply and unself­cons­ciously, perhaps even unwi­llingly, my friend valued the line sepa­ra­ting the men from the boys.

Another exam­ple: A good friend told me that when her son was ele­ven she res­pon­ded to his fai­ling gra­des by explai­ning that when he got older he would have to sup­port a family, just like his father, so he’d bet­ter start lear­ning res­pon­si­bi­lity now. “All his boyish inno­cence,” she said, ” see­med to drain right out of him. Everything was home­work, home­work, home­work. He doesn’t even play with his toys any­more. I wan­ted to improve his gra­des, not turn him into a little man.”

No doubt, and hope­fully, as he rea­li­zed just how far off the adulthood his mother had threa­te­ned him with really was, this boy even­tually went back to being a kid just like any other kid. Indeed, my point here is not that these two inte­rac­tions in and of them­sel­ves repre­sent some per­ma­nent harm done to this boys, but rather that the inte­rac­tions them­sel­ves repre­sent only one small part of the manhood trai­ning boys receive and that each boy’s res­ponse, even in such rela­ti­vely minor situa­tions, corres­pon­ded per­fectly to the manhood ideal: he suc­ked it up and sho­wed that he could “take it.”

In Love, Sex, Death and the Making of the Male, Rosa­lind Miles points out that the old saying “boys will be boys” can be read not only as it usually is, a sta­te­ment of resig­na­tion in the face of ine­vi­ta­bi­lity, but also as an impe­ra­tive: Boys will be boys. The
degree to which this second rea­ding is the more accu­rate one beco­mes fully evi­dent when you look at the con­se­quen­ces of not “being a boy.” Ask any man, and if he’s honest enough to tell you, he will have at least one story, and pro­bably more than one, of how he was hurt when he was a child for not being aggres­sive enough, ath­le­tic enough, stoic enough, sexually objec­tif­ying of girls enough, sexually power­ful enough, com­pe­ti­tive enough, loyal enough to his bud­dies and so on. The hurt the man tells you about may have been phy­si­cal, emo­tio­nal or both; the par­ti­cu­lar story he tells you may involve something rela­ti­vely minor, as in the cases of the two boys I just told you about, or something deeply serious and even life threa­te­ning, like my friend who was sexually assaul­ted and raped by boys he’d through were his friends just because he was the wea­kest and least mas­cu­line among them.

Yet des­pite the radi­cal dis­tance we usually assu­mes sepa­ra­tes a victim/survivor from her or his vic­ti­mi­zers, there is one aspect of his rape that my friend and those raped him have in com­mon, that all boys and men in our cul­ture have in com­mon: their ideas of them­sel­ves as men – and my friend’s friend’s beha­vior was nothing if it was not about their ideas of them­sel­ves as men – are a direct a result of their con­fron­ta­tion with the vio­lence and aggres­sion con­si­de­red to be the nor­mal, natu­ral and neces­sary con­text in which manhood is for­med. None of us can escape this. We may choose to embrace the vio­lence or reject it; we may find some way of accom­mo­da­ting our­sel­ves to it, or we may devote our lives to eli­mi­na­ting it, but there is now way we can avoid con­fron­ting it. This con­fron­ta­tion takes place so per­va­si­vely throughout our lives – how do I res­pond to the pos­tu­ring of the male stu­dent who is cha­llen­ging me about nor accep­ting his late paper, or to the neigh­bor whose threa­te­ning body lan­guage belies the polite tone of his voice as he argues with me about who saw the par­king spot first, or to my son’s insis­tence that he wants a “boy’s only’ birth­day party – that the ques­tion of how or why boys come to value manhood so highly is dwar­fed by the ques­tion Miles asks, “[H]ow do they avoid it?” (58)

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

The next words I want to give you are not mine:

During the course of the Inde­pen­dent Study work I did on per­so­nal essays this semes­ter and when I was in Pro­fes­sor Newman’s advan­ced com­po­si­tion class last semes­ter, I found my voice, [which] ha[d] been silen­ced for many years […] Now I find myself in a situa­tion where I want to say what my new voice has been saying for a while now, but I’m a bit afraid. This is all very new to me — sha­ring my work with an audience, allo­wing someone other than myself to lis­ten to my words.

The essay that I’m going to read to you is very per­so­nal. Wri­ting the essay has hel­ped me come to terms with cer­tain things that have hap­pe­ned to me in my life. What I’m going to say may shock some of you and may even dis­turb some of you, but I’m in the busi­ness of wri­ting the truth.

Cas­san­dra read that pas­sage during the annual Inde­pen­dent Study Collo­quium at the college where I teach, a forum in which all stu­dents who do inde­pen­dent stu­dies in a given year are requi­red to pre­sent their work in order to receive college cre­dit for it. As she spoke, tears came to my eyes. I knew what her essay was about, and I knew how hard it had been for her to write it in the first place, much less gather the cou­rage to read it publicly, and I was deeply moved, the way any teacher would be, to hear a stu­dent speak about their work together the way Cas­san­dra had just spo­ken about ours. I was also crying, howe­ver, because in the pro­cess of hel­ping Cas­san­dra to find her voice, I’d given voice to something in myself that I too had “silen­ced for many years,” and it felt good to be let­ting that silence go.

This part of my story, though, begins not with Cas­san­dra, and not in the inde­pen­dent study we did together, but with Esther, one of Cassandra’s class­ma­tes in the Advan­ced Com­po­si­tion class I’d taught the pre­vious semes­ter. The cen­tral ques­tion I’d used to frame my sylla­bus and the assign­ments I asked my stu­dents to do had been What do you care about enough to write about? Esther made what she cared about very clear from the start. She brought her pro­gres­sive and femi­nist poli­tics into class dis­cus­sion without hesi­ta­tion, and she pep­pe­red me in almost every class with ques­tions about wri­ting that bes­poke a level of pas­sion and com­mit­ment to the craft that few stu­dents bring with them to college. It was Esther who first approached me with the idea of doing an inde­pen­dent study. She wan­ted to be a wri­ter, she said, a wri­ter whose words could change the world – and those were her exact words – and she let me know that, as much as she was loo­king for ins­truc­tion, she was loo­king perhaps even more for a role model. A few weeks later, when she han­ded me the first draft of the essay that would even­tually become the one she read at the Inde­pen­dent Study Collo­quium, I had to decide just how much of a role model I was willing to be.

Esther’s essay dealt with the sexual abuse she’d sur­vi­ved as a child and how she had sha­ped her ideas about motherhood – she had three chil­dren – in res­ponse to that expe­rience. Like any draft, the piece was full of holes, but because I too am a sur­vi­vor of child sexual abuse, and because I had strug­gled for many years, and was in many ways still strug­gling, to learn how to write about had hap­pe­ned to me, I knew that simply focu­sing on the mecha­nics of making the words work and/or pro­vi­ding Esther with model essays by women who had writ­ten suc­cess­fully about this topic, would not be enough. The dif­fi­cul­ties Esther was having in saying what she wan­ted to say were as much emo­tio­nal and psycho­lo­gi­cal as they were wri­terly: the shame of revea­ling what had pre­viously been hid­den; the ques­tion of whether she really had the cou­rage to make such a reve­la­tion; worr­ying about how her family, espe­cially her mother, would react; worr­ying whether anyone would even care about what had hap­pe­ned to her; and, most impor­tantly to her, at least in terms of  why she was in my class, won­de­ring whether she was talen­ted enough to write in a way that per­suade anyone else that they should care.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

At ele­ven, I’m the youn­gest of eight boys lined up along one row of loc­kers in the other­wise empty men’s loc­ker room at the swim­ming pool to which the day camp I am atten­ding takes us every other day. Nor­mally, I’d be chan­ging with boys my own age, but a mix-up back at the camp grounds lan­ded me on the bus with these guys, who are all twelve and thir­teen. I turn my back to them to hide the erec­tion that has taken hold of my body and which I am having dif­fi­culty fit­ting into my bathing suit. Des­pite my best efforts to remain incons­pi­cuous, howe­ver, my move­ments attract the other boys’ atten­tion and one of them sneaks up behind me and looks over my shoul­der. “Hey!” his voice  rings out meta­lli­cally, “look at the size of Newman’s boner!”

The rest of the boys surround me in a tight circle. I stand there una­ble to move, my body poin­ting me into the air above the middle of the room, wishing I could vanish, that it would vanish, but no mat­ter how much I will it, the dam­ned thing will not go down.

“What are you, a homo?”

“Other guys’ dicks must turn him on!”

“Wanna suck mine, queer!?”

The taunts con­ti­nue for what seems like hours, though it is pro­bably only a few minu­tes, and then the head coun­se­lor comes in and ushers us all out to the pool. I can’t believe he didn’t hear what the other boys were saying, but he acts as if he didn’t, barely loo­king at me as he shows me where the boys in my group have spread their towels.

Later that eve­ning, while I’m get­ting ready for bed, I stand naked before the full-length mirror inside my door and tuck my penis out of sight bet­ween my legs. I’m not trying to ima­gine myself as a girl, but I am intri­gued by the pos­si­bi­lity of a body that does not have erections.

///

The first time the old man who lived at the top of the stair­case said hello to me, he stop­ped for a moment as we pas­sed in the court­yard and loo­ked at me as if he’d known me my whole life. I stood there, taking in the warmth of his gaze, wishing as he wal­ked away that I’d said something to make him stay so I could tell him who I was. I was thir­teen years old.

Over the next cou­ple of months, a ritual of gree­ting grew bet­ween us. He would smile and say hello first; I would smile, say the same thing back, and then a long silent moment would pass while he loo­ked at me and I stood there, too hap­pily emba­rras­sed to move.

Then, one late summer’s day, after our usual exchange was over, the old man did not keep wal­king. “When am I going to see you?” he asked.

“Soon!” I ans­we­red, figu­ring he was lonely, like Mrs. Schecht­man had been when she lived in the apart­ment next to his and I used to go sit with her once in a while just to keep her company.

Not too long after­wards, as I was going out to play with my friends, the old man met me at the bot­tom of the stair­case lea­ding to the front door of our buil­ding. It’s pos­si­ble that he’d plan­ned it this way, but I don’t think so; there was no way he could’ve known when I step­ped out of my apart­ment. He was pro­bably just on his way out at the same time I was, and when I reached to turn the knob, he was stan­ding right behind me, hol­ding the door shut with his left forearm. With his right, he maneu­ve­red me face first into the cor­ner near the mail­bo­xes where the door frame met the wall. Cove­ring my body with his own, he ran his hands beneath my shirt and up the legs of my shorts; he gro­ped my chest and belly, squee­zed my butt, cup­ped at my crotch, and all the time, over and over again, he kept asking me that same ques­tion, whis­pe­ring hoar­sely into my ear, “When am I going to see you?”

I had no words for what he was doing to me, no trai­ning such as young chil­dren get now in how to scream no! to scare off an attac­ker. All I could do was stand there till he was finished. Then I ran. I don’t remem­ber how far or how long or even in which direc­tion, but I ran as if I could leave my skin behind, as if run­ning would turn me into another per­son. When I finally stop­ped run­ning, in the small park across the street from the Luthe­ran Church, where my friends and I some­ti­mes hung out at night, I sat a long time with the know­ledge that my run­ning had undone nothing, that my body was still the body he’d touched, and I knew that he would want to touch me again.

I told no one what had hap­pe­ned, and when the old man pas­sed me the next day and said hello, I said hello back the way I always did, pre­ten­ding not to notice the iro­nic and cons­pi­ra­to­rial twist he added to his smile. A few weeks later, he saw me sit­ting with my friends in front of our buil­ding and asked me to help him ups­tairs with some pac­ka­ges he had with him. I wan­ted to say no, but I didn’t know how, not without ris­king that my refu­sal would somehow lead my friends to the truth of what he’d done to me. So I took the pac­kage he poin­ted at from his shop­ping cart – to make it easier, he said, for him to get the cart up the stairs – and follo­wed him to his apartment.

As soon as he’d shut the door of his place behind us, he pushed the cart to the side, took the bag I was hol­ding and drop­ped it to the floor. The cans at the bot­tom of the bag lan­ded with a crash that shook the whole apartment.

Sna­king his arms around my waist, he undid my belt – all I could do was stand there, fro­zen to the spot where my feet had stop­ped moving – and then he unzip­ped my pants and pushed them down so they fell around my ankles. Then he took me gently by the hand and led me to the couch against the wall, where he sat down. Loo­king up at me with a wide smile – I have the dis­tinct memory that he’d taken out his two front teeth – his eyes, at what I ima­gine must have been the fear in mine, grew ten­der, almost fatherly, “You’ve never had a blow­job before, have you?” When I shook my head no, his voice filled with con­cern. “But don’t you want me to love you?”

In the silence with which I res­pon­ded, he took my penis in his hands – I remem­ber thin­king that his fin­gers were like a cage – and he told me how good my penis was, how beau­ti­ful and big, and then his own pants were down, I was sit­ting on the couch, and his own penis, large and pur­ple, hung in front of my face, and his voice came from somewhere above me, urging me to play with it, at least to touch it, and I don’t remem­ber if I did, but I do remem­ber his hand on the back of my neck, and then I see myself wal­king word­lessly to his front door, unloc­king it, clo­sing it behind me, and then I am in my bed, cur­led in the fetal posi­tion, where I stay until my mother calls me for dinner.

The next day, he saw me stan­ding by myself in front of our buil­ding and plea­ded with me to go ups­tairs with him again. This time, he promised,would be dif­fe­rent. He would move more slowly, be more gentle, but something in me rebe­lled. I said no, igno­ring his further please until he wal­ked away.

He never spoke to me again, and he even­tually moved away, and I have no doubt there are other men in this world who had with him when they were boys an expe­rience simi­lar to mine. I remem­ber only once trying to tell someone what he’d done to me. I was sit­ting outside with my friend Kim when he pas­sed by. He igno­red me and nod­ded hello to her; she nod­ded in return. When I knew he was out of earshot, I tur­ned to her, tried to fill my voice with everything she’d need to unders­tand what I really meant, and said, “He’s a faggot!”

Kim loo­ked at me in honest con­fu­sion, “So what if he’s gay? So what?”

The blank stare I ans­we­red her with was as uncom­prehen­ding as the silence in which she wai­ted for me to explain myself. I don’t remem­ber being expli­citly, acti­vely, homopho­bic, but ever­yone knew – or at least I thought ever­yone knew – that it was only homo­se­xual men who pre­yed on young boys. Now, of course, I know dif­fe­rently, but to have said anything else at the time would have ris­ked my telling Kim the whole story, and that’s something I would not be ready to do for some time.

Cross-posted on Alas.

If you haven’t already, I urge you to read Part 1 and Part 2. (If you haven’t read Part 2, or haven’t read it in a while, you might want to read it before rea­ding Part 3, if only because the last para­graph of Part 2 feeds very spe­ci­fi­cally into what Part 3 is about. I will also say that Part 3, more so than either 1 or 2, con­tains mate­rial that some peo­ple might find dis­tur­bing and/or trig­ge­ring. The issues rai­sed by that mate­rial are resol­ved not in Part 3 itself, but later in the essay. I ask, the­re­fore, for your patience in that regard, and I also ask that you be patient if my response(s) to com­ments about that mate­rial ask you to wait until I get to those later parts of the essay.)

Part 3

Sit­ting on my bed with her back against the wall, Beth – who’s come to visit during my first year of gra­duate school – is telling me something that I wish I could remem­ber. Indeed, in the first drafts of this essay, inc­lu­ding the one that was published online, I wrote this pas­sage as if I did remem­ber. I had her telling me that she’d deci­ded to study fine art, a deci­sion I’m pretty sure she actually made around the time that what I am about tell you took place; and it may have been that her deci­sion was what we were tal­king about. Beth had been strug­gling with how to give what she con­si­de­red legi­ti­mate and pur­po­se­ful expres­sion to the crea­ti­vity that was in her for some time, but the fact is that I don’t remem­ber and to let you think that I do would be to create, if not a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion – because jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, while it was the first word that came to mind, is wrong for what I want to say – than a logi­cal expla­na­tion for something that I have in been trying unsuc­cess­fully to explain to myself for more than 20 years.

So, Beth is sit­ting on my bed and tal­king, but I am sud­denly lis­te­ning from a place so deep inside myself that the sounds lea­ving her mouth no lon­ger coa­lesce into mea­ning­ful units. There is a moment of blank­ness and then, as if someone else has taken con­trol of my brain, I am for­ced to watch a vision of myself get­ting up from the chair when I’ve been sit­ting, put­ting one hand around Beth’s throat, hol­ding her against the wall, and with my other hand slap­ping her back and forth until she is sen­se­less and bloody. I see myself screa­ming in her ear, let­ting her drop to the floor and kic­king her in the sto­mach as hard as I can. In the vision, my mouth moves but no words come out.

Una­ware that I’ve stop­ped hea­ring what she has to say, Beth con­ti­nues tal­king, ges­tu­ring to empha­size the impor­tance of her words, implo­ring with her eyes for I-don’t-know-what, and then the vio­lence in my mind begins again. Rea­li­zing that my hands have clenched into fists, I excuse myself and move quickly to the bath­room. Loc­king the door behind me, I take deep breaths and splash cold water on my face. When I’m sure the impulse to lash out has pas­sed, I flush the toi­let and go back to the bedroom where, thank­fully, Beth noti­ces it’s time for me to go to class, and she tells me she’ll finish later. I grab my books, kiss her quickly on the cheek and, kno­wing I will need some time alone to try to sort out what has just hap­pe­ned, tell her that I have work to do in the library and the­re­fore won’t be back until just before we’re sup­po­sed to go out for dinner.

The after­noon sun is warm on my face, so I decide to walk to class ins­tead of taking the bus. Beth’s deci­sion to become an artist should make me happy. (I know I just wrote that I am not sure this deci­sion is what we were tal­king about, but it was an issue in our rela­tionship at the time, and since I’ve men­tio­ned it, I don’t want to leave it han­ging without at least some expla­na­tion.) Not only does it mean that she’s choo­sing to do what she really wants to do, but it also holds out the pro­mise of a reso­lu­tion to a ten­sion bet­ween us that I had given up being able to do anything about. More than once, Beth has told me she’s afraid I will become more com­mit­ted to my wri­ting than to her. Now that she has her own art to com­mit to, I’m hoping she’ll begin to see that the two com­mit­ments need not be mutually exclusive.

I’m star­ting to feel a little bet­ter, more in con­trol of myself, but I begin to rea­lize that I will never be able to sit through class. I need somewhere quiet, where I can sit by myself and really think about what hap­pe­ned this morning.

I head to the library.

My idea as I settle into one of the chairs on the second floor is to  write out what I’m fee­ling in a let­ter to myself, a stra­tegy I’ve used before when I don’t know what’s going on inside me. As soon as I put my pen to the page, though, what comes out does not begin Dear Richard. Ins­tead, it is the begin­ning of a poem:

 I want a bear­ded man, shirt­less, in faded jeans,

to come one bare­foot night and take me in his mouth.

I don’t know where the words come from, but the shock of recog­ni­tion when I read them is imme­diate and frigh­te­ning, and I know there is a cla­rity in them that I am not fully able to see. Sta­ring at the page, una­ble to write another word, I won­der if I’m trying to tell myself that I’m gay and that the pro­blem I have with Beth is that I should be going out with a boy ins­tead. I remem­ber Brian and how we became friends in our senior year of high school, watching a team­mate strike out trying too hard to hit the ball over the fence during a gym-class soft­ball game.

“I don’t get it,” Brian said to no one in par­ti­cu­lar, sha­king his head from side to side as the other boy slam­med his bat to the ground, threa­te­ned to beat the shit out of the pitcher, and stor­med off the field as if he’d fai­led to make a team he’d dedi­ca­ted his life to making. “I just don’t get it.”

“Get what?” I asked.

We’d been stan­ding next to each other through most of the class, but Brian loo­ked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “What’s the big deal? I mean, it’s not like he’s going to fail for stri­king out.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Brian’s face lit up as if he were visi­ting from another country and had at last found someone who could speak his lan­guage. Then his eyes narro­wed a little, “Yeah, but at least you can hit the ball.” It was a test; he was not much of an athlete.

“So I can hit the ball,” I res­pon­ded. “So what?”

And we were friends; and we quickly became best friends. Sadly, though, what I remem­ber most about our friendship is the day it began to end. “You’re just dif­fe­rent,” he told me. We  were sit­ting in my room. “I’ve never met anyone like you, and they just can’t accept that.”

“I’ve never met anyone like you before either,” I said, not even bothe­ring to ask him who they were.

“But they’re saying we’re clo­ser than we should be, that we’re not, you know, normal.”

“So? When has either of us ever really cared about what they have to say?”

Brian loo­ked so gra­te­ful for these words that I thought he was going to cry, and his eyes did start to grow big with a fee­ling that welled up in him, but then he loo­ked away and almost whis­pe­red, “Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are clo­ser than we should be.”

I tried to con­vince him that he was wrong, but it didn’t work. He star­ted – or at least in memory, he star­ted brin­ging female friends along whe­ne­ver we went out, and – again, as I remem­ber it – college appli­ca­tions, year­book com­mit­tee mee­tings and other graduation-related work sud­denly kept him so busy that he had less and less time to see me. The sum­mer after gra­dua­tion, while I was wor­king at a sleep-away camp in Mas­sachu­setts
, we wrote let­ters, but when I came home, he was gone, off to his fresh­man year at Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity. I pro­bably had his phone num­ber and address, but I don’t think I ever used them, and I don’t remem­ber recei­ving either mail or phone calls from him. We did try once to recon­nect during the win­ter break of our fresh­man year, mee­ting for a drink at one of the bars we’d hung out at when we were still close. He brought his girl­friend, a dark woman I remem­ber sit­ting silently in the cor­ner of the booth while Brian and I strug­gled to find things to say to each other. The con­ver­sa­tion is lost to me now, but I can still feel the fina­lity of our good-byes, neither of us even pre­ten­ding we’d try to see each other again.

At the end of the aca­de­mic year, while I wai­ted on line to regis­ter for my sopho­more clas­ses, I met the woman who’d sat next to me in twelfth-grade English. “Wha­te­ver hap­pe­ned to your friend Brian?” she asked.

“He’s at Cor­nell,” I ans­we­red, “but I haven’t heard from him in a while.”

“You know,” she said, “ever­yone thought the two of you were gay.”

“I know.”

“Were you?”

“No.”

With cine­ma­tic timing my turn to regis­ter came next, and I gave her a small, silent wave as I wal­ked to the registrar’s win­dow. I have con­ti­nued throughout all these years, howe­ver, to won­der about my ans­wer. It was the ans­wer I think Brian would have wan­ted me to give, and I gave it without a second thought. Des­pite its lite­ral truth, howe­ver, or, rather, its truth given that what the woman pro­bably wan­ted to know was whether Brian and I had been having sex, the word “no” has felt disho­nest to me for a long time, as if what I had done was to deny the emo­tio­nal con­tent of our friendship, not cha­rac­te­rize its phy­si­cal nature.

When I think about Brian now, I often wish to have back that moment when he deci­ded “they” were right and we were wrong. Not because I think I could have done anything dif­fe­rently to change his mind, but because envi­sio­ning how things might have been dif­fe­rent is a ges­ture of defiance I wish I had made a long time ago, a way to begin figu­ring out the ans­wer I ought to have given to the woman from my English class, and of unders­tan­ding why I res­pon­ded with a homoe­ro­tic poem to the vio­lence I ima­gi­ned years later doing to Beth. We ended up not going to din­ner that night. After I wrote those two lines, I felt bet­ter, cal­mer, more at peace with myself, and so I was able to tell her about the vision my ima­gi­na­tion had con­ju­red for me. We spent the night trying to figure out where in our rela­tionship my anger came from, but our only suc­cess – at least from my point of view, since it left me bent over, laughing with hys­te­ri­cal relief – was that I found the cou­rage to scream what I was really fee­ling, and they were words I regret even now, “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”

Beth, of course, was horri­fied and deeply, deeply hurt, but ins­tead of brea­king up with me, or at least put­ting some dis­tance bet­ween us while I tried to figure out where my rage was coming from, she sta­yed with me for the rest of the wee­kend, a deci­sion I can only desc­ribe as cou­ra­geous and loving, and we tal­ked and tal­ked our way into the fee­ling that we could stay together, which we did for five more years. I was immen­sely gra­te­ful to her for that, though I don’t think I ever expres­sed that gra­ti­tude sufficiently.

What dis­tur­bed me at the time – aside from the con­tent of what I ima­gi­ned – and what con­ti­nues to haunt me whe­ne­ver I think about it, is that I didn’t even know I was so angry. There were ten­sions in my rela­tionship with Beth, as there are in any rela­tionship, but nothing of a mag­ni­tude, or at least nothing I expe­rien­ced as of a mag­ni­tude, that corres­pon­ded even a little to the vio­lence I’d ima­gi­ned myself doing. Even now, more than two deca­des later – and in all that time I’ve had nothing even remo­tely resem­bling the expe­rience I’ve just desc­ri­bed – I find myself won­de­ring what I don’t know about the sub­te­rra­nean wor­kings of my psyche. I am an angry man – though I am now a much less angry man than I was when I first wrote this essay – and I know that much of my anger is sexual, and if there is anything that being a man is sup­po­sed to give you license to do, and I am tal­king here about deeply held cul­tu­ral values, not the laws of any given country, or the ethi­cal or moral prin­ci­ples taught by reli­gion, it is to take your sexual anger out on the bodies of others, usually women, and to do so with rela­tive impun­tiy. I have, as you will see, good rea­son to be angry. Part of what wri­ting and rew­ri­ting this essay has been about, for me, has been lear­ning to stop being afraid of my anger and, the­re­fore, of myself.