Donna Minkowitz

Maybe, he thinks, he has a lead on a date, even if not the actual date. Gay people in Laramie like to meet other gay people just to socialize, just to meet people who might have friends who’d be dates. I have felt that way, too; it is a universal feeling shared by everyone who has ever really wanted a date, and I can channel Matthew, wanting somebody tender, somebody who might really know the way to treat a boy, someone with lips wine-dark and soft.

Russell and Aaron look like they could be gay, they even look cute. Their hands are dirty, but that only adds to their appeal. They are, after all, roofers. Walt Whitman noticed how sexy roofers are, and they are — those bare chests perched precariously on houses, sunburned awkwardly. But these are also boys who think they’re nobodies, they’re wimps. In their group of annoying, meth-crazed friends, Aaron is bullied all the time. They put him in headlocks and call him “the shrimp.” Russell, the cuter one, used to be an honors student, but his mother is the town’s most famous battering victim. He got hit by all her boyfriends, and then he and Aaron became meth-heads and dropped out of high school together. Now Russell’s mad all the time that he isn’t in college.

Matthew’s wearing beautiful clothes. Russell and Aaron stare open-mouthed at the stranger at the end of the bar, in his sports coat and his exquisitely clean shave, who thanks the bartender with a wonderful politeness after every round. The bartender loves him. He tips the bartender each time, which is more than most people in Laramie do. His hands are flower-like, and he is slight as a wand. He might be a wood nymph, sitting in their neighborhood bar in Laramie. They have never been allowed to be this feminine. They have never been allowed to take such pleasure in fabrics and textures as this boy is taking in his beautiful, expensive clothes, but they have wanted to.

Aaron lives with his infant son and sour 18-year-old girlfriend in a house that’s falling apart all around them. He burglarized a Kentucky Fried Chicken last year and his defense in court was that he was too drunk to know if he was stealing anything. Russell lives with his girlfriend in the most depressing trailer I have ever seen, with an outboard motor rusting in the yard and a neighbor’s vicious dogs to keep out unexpected visitors. Russell and Aaron can tell just by looking at Matthew that he’s fluent in Arabic, French and German; that he was able to be openly gay in high school, at a fabulous private school in Switzerland; that he has already decided on a career in international human rights.

The two of them scramble for change to pay for their beers, and they finally piece it together, $5.50 in change, and the bartender who likes Matthew so much doesn’t even want to touch their hands because their hands are that filthy. Suddenly, a silken voice surprises them all. “Let me help you with that,” the stranger says.

It’s the boy at the end of the bar. He’s the same age as they are, and it all feels like too much very quickly. They’re in a soup of intense and different emotions, all at once. They hate him for offering. They want to shove the money right back in his face. And they are gratified obscurely, like a lady at a tea party for whom a gentleman has covertly poured the tea. Now Matthew smiles a smile of terrifying sweetness and tells the boys he’s gay. Mingled odors of flowers and garbage stir in their minds, temptation and danger. They have always resisted the danger before, but no one has ever offered so brazenly, so ecstatically as this commanding little boy with bleached-blond hair. They’re attracted and appalled. His tiny body and the warmth wafting out of every part of him fill them with as much hatred mixed with longing as they’ve ever felt for any girl.

Or maybe even more. Russell and Aaron spend a lot of their time thinking they’re nothing, thinking they are garbage. In just a month Russell’s mother will freeze to death after staggering out of a bar, and not a single person will be surprised. Aaron spent most of his childhood locked in a basement. I’m not making this up. But till now, they’ve at least warded off being the sexual hollow men, sexual garbage that’s always been dinned into them as encompassed by one word — “fag.”

Boys are afraid of this word because it makes them think of openness, and violence. Sexuality and punishment both, in the same act. Beauty and terror. That’s why they clamp tight down on this word and never let it bloom in them.

I wasn’t brought up as a boy. And I’ve never been remotely homophobic. But I am right there with Russell and Aaron as they feel desire and terror at once, and they wonder what to do with this boy.

When I go to Laramie to write about this murder, I have just jumped into a new relationship that makes me feel as though I’ve plunged into the ocean. I am nauseous, and it’s icy cold. My new girlfriend makes me feel so open sexually that I feel in peril. It’s too hard to be that open and that vulnerable. It alternately hurts and makes me feel queasy, as though all my nerve endings have been sliced open. It’s also beautiful, there are hot colors everywhere and I even feel that sick, enormous hope that worthwhile things will happen and this one will stick around.

The girls I get involved with always make me want to kill them in direct proportion to the love and pleasure that they make me feel. I’m not a murderer, but I am, like many of us, someone who can get enraged by joy because of what it lays you open to. My rage at these girls doesn’t come from homophobia, but from that older, other thing that causes it, the bare and naked fear of sex and love. When I date, I am afraid of being obliterated, annihilated, crushed like a flower under someone’s shoe, and that’s exactly what boys feel when they start to be afraid of being gay.

What no one will admit about the Matthew Shepard slaying was that it was a murder about love as well as rage, there was sweet longing in it as well as the furious urgency to squash that longing. Russell and Aaron were motivated by beauty, not just disgust, and they picked the most beautiful place in town to kill him in because they could not not express that longing, that inner sweetness, in something. Everyone goes to this prairie to commune with beauty and that is what Russell and Aaron, in their agitation and torment, are trying to do as they lug that beautiful boy up there. They do not know what to do and so they hit him with the pistol and they hit him again and there is a flower they are trying to obliterate and maybe if they hit him enough times they can.

He encounters the woman hanging out by the hostel’s lockers, where two men are trying to force their way upstairs so they can beat up a guest who owes them money. Outside are lots of muggers and pickpockets, “gays in chaps and shirtless women cruising” and “junkies [who] sat on bags of garbage sticking their arms.” Elliott tells the clay-colored woman where he saw her before (she asks, “What were you doing in that bar?”) and, although he’s terrified he will have to walk back to the hostel alone — because “there was no safe way back to the hostel at night” — he goes with her for a drink, then to her hotel room.

Without asking his consent, preferences or anything else (“take your clothes off and put them in the corner” is all she says) she cuts his legs with a knife (threatening his balls), burns him with a cigarette, and temporarily asphyxiates him. It’s his first S/M scene after a childhood and adolescence full of experiences of rape and assault in youth homes, after being thrown out of the house by his abusive father at the age of 13. His reaction? “I was very comfortable,” Elliott writes. “I don’t think I had ever been comfortable before.”

That passage is one of the reasons to love this book. “My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up” is a collection of linked stories that Elliott says amount to something “damn close” to a memoir. But Elliott, a Salon contributor and author of the critically acclaimed novel “Happy Baby,” also says he “knowingly made up” some details and created a few composite characters, so “My Girlfriend ” should more narrowly be considered fiction. Still, the author wishes to acknowledge “the general if not complete truth of this book” and, in particular, the fact that “every sexual act” depicted happened.

To Elliott, it’s important to affirm his book’s veracity because he wants all S/M people to feel freer and less ashamed. But I’m glad that he puts it out as true for a slightly different reason: because it shows the genuine, unmitigable weirdness of all human beings, sexually and otherwise. Elliott’s emotional truthfulness is what is bravest here, not his sexual candor. His willingness to reveal himself in all his vulnerable glory is moving and strangely redemptive in the sense that it makes all our strange feelings and self-destructive acts comprehensible and worthy of compassion.

Leather folk or not, we all have some perilous or disturbing desires, and we all have, at least once, acted on them. In this context, S/M is a good cypher for all counter-rational deeds: We’ve all been, at least metaphorically, in that scuzzy hostel in Amsterdam.

When Elliott wakes up with the clay-colored woman, for example, it is probably the first time he has ever felt emotionally close to another human being because of sex. Like so many of us, he feels the need to flee immediately after feeling so intimate, actually going straight to the train station and out of the country. “I didn’t understand what I was feeling. I thought it was an urge to be buried alive or drowned but it was probably a desire to crawl back into bed and stay.” In Berlin he rents a tiny room and lies in bed for two weeks, “listening to German radio and sleeping and masturbating until my penis was lined with friction sores and broken skin.” Then he heads back to Amsterdam, can’t find her — he doesn’t even know her name — and feels only loss.

What makes Stephen Elliott’s writing most distinctive is that he’s not afraid of sadness, even sadness that is inspired by crazy feelings or sadness that is not ever redeemed. In my time, I’ve certainly confused attraction and love with being drowned or buried alive — haven’t you, at least once? And I have also felt safer, on occasion, with ugly or dangerous people, as Elliott does. But few writers of memoir take up the challenge and go to frightening places like this, because America hates sadness and sad facts, and hates imperfection — the quality of not being “OK” — most of all.

Strangely, S/M writers are sometimes the most squeamish of all when it comes to revealing imperfection, moral haziness or even ambiguity in themselves and their erotic relationships. Under attack from the right, S/M authors are so often worried about letting down their side that they present sadomasochists in a sanitized, even whitewashed way that refuses to acknowledge the existence of tops who sometimes violate their bottoms’ consent, or occasions when consent is equivocal. Or, even more heretical, encounters that leave some participants sad or unfulfilled.

But Elliott, an S/M activist and a fierce activist for progressive causes generally, is unwilling to bowdlerize his own life. In the title piece, “My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up,” a woman Elliott meets online purposefully gets enraged at him at the beginning of each date so that she can hurt him as much as she wants to. Many tops do this, of course, but this suburban woman does it so cloyingly and obviously that beyond being ethically questionable, it’s just not sexy. “Why don’t you just tell me my scene? Why don’t you do that?” she yells when he asks what she would like him to do. “It’s too late for sorry.” Then she hits him so hard in the ears that he’s afraid it will damage his hearing. He tries to rev himself up for her. “It’s not like outside of the bedroom we had interesting conversations … Maybe if I was tied up or something I could get in the mood. But what do you do when you’re not in the mood and someone is hitting you and you want them to stop?”

Yet after this truly annoying woman says something disturbing about Elliott’s dead mother (something he hasn’t asked for) and he cries, he finds himself asking her to hurt him. “Why do I want her to hurt me now? Now that I feel so vulnerable and sad.” When she pinches his nipples so hard that he screams, he says, “Please don’t stop,” “my voice getting higher and softer the more she squeezes, the more it hurts, until I’m certain she’ll break the skin. Why do I like it now and not before?”

This girlfriend writes a letter telling him she wants to “beat me way past the point of crying, to the point of yelling Oh Please God No, and the neighbors wouldn’t come.” Is this erotic? Is it terrible and sad? In this story, her fantasy comes across as both, which is some of Elliott’s genius. Unlike the strictest S/M ideologues on the one hand or right-wing moralists on the other, he’s not content to let it be one or the other. He shows his truth, which is that it is both.

In another story, “Other Desires, ” Elliott works at a hellish San Francisco bagel shop whose customers are nearly all junkies in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. His co-worker, Valerie, gets high a lot and has pink pigtails and an abusive, jerky boyfriend whom she loves. (Fancying himself a knife-thrower, the boyfriend amuses himself by throwing knives at Valerie’s head. He also shakes down a young girl who is an addict and prostitute, threatening her in the bagel store as Elliott watches.) If this were a typical avant-garde book about slumming, Valerie and her boyfriend and Elliott would all be colorful, at least mostly fun, and superior to all the boring people who don’t throw knives at people’s heads, or live and work in poor neighborhoods full of junkies and prostitutes. But Elliott and Valerie and the young girl are not presented as having that much fun.

This story features another irritating dom, named Bell, who insists that Elliott pretend to be jealous of her (possibly nonexistent) husband. “My husband knows,” she says. She walks deliberately, one boot in front of the other. “Yeah, I told him.” (When Elliott can’t muster up enough outrage about this, she pulls his hair.) On another occasion, she calls and says, charmingly, “Get me off … Imagine me hitting you. Imagine the phone between my legs. I’m sitting on your face. I’m smothering you. You can’t breathe.” Did I mention that she’s physically unattractive?

But, of course, Elliott also likes what Bell says and does to him, which is why he stays despite frequently wanting, and sometimes trying, to break up with her. When she fucks him with a strap-on, he fantasizes about the very first time he was raped, by a middle-aged caseworker in a Chicago juvenile detention home. “When I masturbate at night, I think of him, not of his image or his malty smell, just the darkness and the fear and the pain.” And when Bell insists that he cannot break up with her, he willingly goes to the movies with her, where she asphyxiates him with a gag that has a strap, and he eroticizes how he wants “to move out of this. To squirm … When the lights come on I’m resting; I can hardly feel my hair caught in the buckle.”

Still, after bravely portraying ambiguities for most of the book, Elliott does finally succumb to romanticism. Partly, that’s because he finds someone worth loving. The last four stories in “My Girlfriend” are about a tender, thoughtful woman Elliott eventually hooks up with who also cuts him with a knife, punches him in the head, and asphyxiates him for her pleasure. But this woman, whom he calls Eden, tells him she loves him, puts chocolate in his mouth after she tortures him, actually asks him what he needs “to make this work” when he’s worried that her husband and her other boyfriend will prevent him from getting enough time with her.

For some people, this truly would be paradise. It apparently is for Elliott. But because he and Eden love each other, he seems to ignore the times she does trespass his boundaries and expressed wishes. Although ethical S/M hinges on the bottom’s absolute consent, there are times when both Elliott and his lover seem indifferent to this dictum. On one occasion Elliott can’t breathe because she is closing the air hole in a mask she made him wear, and he shakes his head “no no no no” — he wants it to stop. She asks “Are you saying no to me?” But Elliott can’t go that far. “So I lie still and take what she wants to give me, which is what I always do when I think she’s going too far — stretch myself out, take more…” Unlike in his other stories, the authorial voice in these pretends that this is fine.

In other passages, he has no problem delving deeply into similar minefields. For example, although he ostensibly loves pain, another story has Elliott realizing, ecstatically, that a certain time when Eden is fucking him he feels the pleasure with no pain at all, just physical delight and joy. “I couldn’t believe it didn’t hurt.” For many, many readers who are quite seldom acknowledged in American fiction, the prospect of enjoying sex with no pain at all, not even psychic pain, is so unusual and so hard-won that it is an event, like this, when it comes. This prospect actually makes Elliott say, “Here’s what makes me think I’m not kinky anymore.”

On a certain level, Elliott seems to grasp the contradiction between Eden’s love and the 25 stripes that she carves into his back. In an epilogue titled “My Mainstream Girlfriend” he talks about how rarely she cuts him, how they go the movies, he loves to eat her out, they’re not really all that leathery after all! If the narrator didn’t feel any anxiety about the contradiction, he wouldn’t include all the benign details. Yet Elliott is heroic as a writer because for the most part, he does face unsettling ambiguities — millions of them — in this book. What do you do when a part of you wants or even needs something that will make you feel like shit? What do you do when your own experience of abuse is intimately, maybe indissolubly connected to the parts of you that love? When Eden beats his head, Elliott writes, “The animal I sound like doesn’t exist yet. Like a strange beast dying in the forest.” He wants to find that beast, to hear it fully, figure out what it’s trying to say. The beginning of comprehending that strange animal is to give it voice as eloquently as Elliott has.

Gnosticism is the most radical religion I know, because it is the only one that entertains the idea that God is evil — and wants us all to rebel against his bullying, rapacious, jealous rule.

There has been an enormous flurry of interest in this 2,000-year-old Judaism-based religion in the past few years. Witness the bestselling novel “The Da Vinci Code,” the groundbreaking work of Christianity scholar Elaine Pagels, the mega-popularity of the gnostic Gospel of Thomas (discovered in Egypt in 1945 and promoted in Pagels’ 2003 bestseller “Beyond Belief”), and a cover story in Time magazine trumpeting the fact that “more and more people are turning to [those] ancient texts to develop their own religious rites.” Of course, the extremely gnostic “Matrix” trilogy, with its notion that this world is an elaborate simulation created by evil forces to harm us, only made Gnostic mania burn even hotter.

Now biblical scholar Marvin Meyer and acclaimed poet and translator Willis Barnstone have published a huge collection of Gnostic sacred writings. These include not just the famous Jewish and Christian heresies from before the third century A.D. that are usually indicated by the G-word, but also medieval Manichaean, Cathar, Persian, and even Islamic and Chinese heresies that stem, in one way or another, from that original Middle Eastern manic Gnostic spark.

I was very excited to see all of these radical, anti-Yahweh religious texts assembled in one volume, some of them in English for the first time. I had never seen actual Manichaean or Cathar prayers and was particularly breathless to see work by the Bogomils, a Cathar group who allegedly permitted adherents to practice only homosexual sex in order to avoid procreating more beings enslaved to the evil God. (The word “bugger” supposedly comes from their name.)

I’m sad to tell you, based on this new edition, that it is heartbreakingly easy for radical, God-mocking heresies to turn into smarmy vanilla orthodoxy. Barnstone and Meyer’s take on the Gnostic works, and many of the included works themselves, are reverential, conventional and, er, dull. How in the screaming heavens did this happen? For one thing, “The Gnostic Bible” is supposed to be a compendium for the layperson, but Barnstone and Meyer end up giving us the worst of both worlds, academia and uninformed pop culture. Their edition combines the sorts of things that give academic writing a bad name — long, dry introductions to the texts, obtrusive footnotes that state the obvious — with no effort to elucidate the really juicy and controversial points on which lay readers might like some guidance.

For example, they refuse to touch the burning question of whether Gnosticism was feminist, or whether some Gnostics, at least, organized their ancient communities in feminist ways. There is abundant evidence that many of the Gnostics saw God and the sacred in radically different gender terms than their ancient Jewish and Christian contemporaries. In one text, “The Secret Book of John,” God (the good God, not the bullying one) says, “I am the father. I am the mother. I am the child.” In several, Sakla, which means “Idiot,” is said to have gone astray because he forgot that all of his power came from his mother, the celestial luminary Wisdom. Many of the writings portray both the good God and Sakla as hermaphroditic: The good God is the mother-father, and Sakla essentially fucks himself to create the material world and Adam and Eve.

Indeed, the Gnostics are refreshingly candid about sex in many of their writings, much more so than canonical Christian writers. Sakla is often said to be “an abortion” somehow delivered from his superior mother, and the evil Elohim — remember the weird plural bits in the Book of Genesis that have God and his buddies having sex with “the daughters of men” to produce a race of giants? — try to rape Eve’s mouth and masturbate over the image of the heroic Norea, a bold human woman who also embodies the Female Spiritual Principle, a female divine entity important in the Gnostic celestial scheme. Norea, like a lot of other women in these texts, stands up to male power and wins: When Noah refuses to allow her entrance to his ark, she blows on it and sets it afire. When Sakla and his fellow rulers try to rape her, telling her that they’ve already done this to her mother, Eve, she defies them coolly: “You did not know my mother. Instead it was your own female [that is, the shadowy reflection with which Eve tricked them] that you knew.”

Elaine Pagels, perhaps the most prominent scholar of Gnosticism, argues that the Gnostics believed in social and religious equality between men and women, 2,000 years before the feminism we know. Besides the evidence I’ve already mentioned, Christian Gnostic literature features a Gospel of Mary (Magdalene) and numerous other references to Mary Magdalene as an honored disciple of Jesus. Irenaeus and Tertullian, orthodox Christians who wrote scathing contemporary denunciations of the Gnostics, noted disapprovingly that Gnostics allowed women to prophesy, to teach and even to be priests. Meyer and Barnstone don’t even mention this fascinating factoid. While they note Pagels’ contentions in passing, they basically sit out the furious controversy over whether the Gnostics were actually feminist or just had some funny myths about God’s gender.

While they’re at it, they also ignore most of the juicy questions about where the Gnostics stood on sex. “The Da Vinci Code,” the inane mystery novel that has been the No. 1 bestseller for months now, is based on the idea that the mainstream Christian church suppressed Gnostic writings because they included the “fact” that Jesus had a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene. The Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary, both included in this volume, call Mary Magdalene Jesus’ “companion.” One of them says that Jesus frequently used to kiss her on the mouth, which made the other disciples jealous. Meyer and Barnstone translate these words, but refuse to elucidate further what scholars think about this possible sexual relationship, what role a sexual Jesus might have played in the overall Gnostic worldview, or how it would have jibed with the Gnostics’ typical condemnation of sex as a behavior that ties us tighter to the arrogant Sakla, the “God of the blind,” and his gross material world.

Which brings us to the most disappointing thing about “The Gnostic Bible”: Its failure to address what turns out to be the most interesting thing about the 15 centuries of Gnostic spirituality included here, the enormous contradictions among (and even within) these supposedly heretical, long-suppressed works. Gnosticism was stamped out — the texts literally burned, and their adherents tortured and murdered — by mainstream Christians and the orthodox of other religions, only partly because it was politically radical.

In some ways, Gnosticism wasn’t radical at all. The hatred of sex and the body promulgated in most Gnostic works was even more intense than that of the mainstream church. But sometimes the Gnostics appeared to celebrate deviant sexuality — as with the Cathars, 11th to 13th century French Gnostics who, Barnstone tells us, thought sex outside of marriage was fine, particularly if it didn’t lead to conception. Yet he and Meyer avoid the questions this raises. Did this specifically mean that homosexual sex was OK? Did the Cathars think sex outside marriage was merely acceptable, or morally superior to married sex? And the editors of “The Gnostic Bible” simply never bring up the delightful claim, made by some historians, that the Bogomils, Bulgarian antecedents of the Cathars, were the original in-your-face buggers.

Predictably, they also steer clear of an even messier contradiction: that based on their texts, the Gnostics seem to have been just as sexist as they were feminist. Though female figures were sometimes divine for them, women in the texts are also singled out as uniquely deficient. Sakla’s mother, Wisdom, is sometimes blamed for giving us the entire realm of evil to begin with, by foolishly thinking she could create a baby (Sakla) without a man. In the Gospel of Thomas, Simon Peter tells Jesus that Mary (Magdalene) should leave the disciples, because women are not worthy. Jesus replies with the curious statement that it’s OK for Mary to stay, because Jesus is going to make her male. “For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Yet the saddest unexplored contradiction in “The Gnostic Bible” is that of heterodoxy itself. Many of these writings are revoltingly pious, in the sense that within their own schemas, authority must not be questioned. Dogma and church power (or celestial power) rule. As in, you must do exactly as I say because I have the greater knowledge of the spiritual realm. Or, you must believe what I tell you because I am the superior luminary come to you from the ninth heaven (divine beings in the Gnostic texts often talk this way). Of course, Father, the lesser humans and acolytes in these texts reply. How can I escape my disgusting body? Frequently I had to put the book down because I could not take another brainless celebration of our truly good eternal Father (as I told you, they also believe in a good one) and how the stupid humans who don’t believe in him will be punished at the end of time.

Willis Barnstone, among numerous other virtues that I haven’t cited, has written an appealing epilogue addressing one of the most lovable things about the Gnostics, the chutzpah with which they deconstructed the religions they were born into, turning them on their heads. He suggests that this impulse stems from the horror in most Jews’ and Christians’ lives late in the 1st century A.D., with the Roman crushing of the Jewish rebellion in Jerusalem, the destruction of the Second Temple, and the torture and murder of thousands of Jews and Christians (who were also, at that time, it must be mentioned, Jewish).

Barnstone does not, however, address the most fascinating thing about the relationship between the Gnostics and horror. Abuse, rape, torture and other prerogatives of evil authority play a central role in Gnostic thought, a role they do not have in any other religion I can think of. The central question for most Gnostic believers was, how shall I deal with all the evil things that may be done to me (or that have been done to me) in this society where violent power rules? Whatever else it may be, Gnosticism is the religion that is radically anti-ruler, anti-violence, anti-whoever’s in power. For all its contradictions, that makes it something pretty holy.

Less amusingly, they also participated in (a very scant few of them) or supported (most of them) the violent 1981 Brinks robbery, for which Kathy Boudin served 22 years in prison, until her recent parole. Boudin and her backers saw the Nyack, N.Y., robbery as a way whites could use their privilege to support black insurgents who could more easily be arrested, beaten or killed by police than they. Boudin and three others were assigned by the black activists they followed slavishly to drive the getaway cars. There’s a certain courage and nobility to the concept, if you forget that real, live security guards (two of them) and one black policeman were killed in the “expropriation,” or that, according to some reports, the particular black activists involved intended to line their own pockets with the money, not build revolution.

There’s a racist noblesse oblige to the idea, too, of course: The notion that black people should always be obeyed denies African-Americans’ humanity to just as great an extent as the idea that they should always be discounted. There was also, in both the Weather Underground and the John Brown cliques, a certain star-struck, competitive and Hollywoodish understanding of revolution (in which almost all American leftists have at times participated, including yours truly). But the competitive, star-fucking and star-wannabe aspects of Boudin’s two groups have been equaled by few — except by members of her own biological family, the subject of Braudy’s book.

With the subtlety of a sledgehammer, “Family Circle” portrays the Boudin parents, grandparents, famous radical great-uncle Louis Boudin and famous uncle I.F. Stone as the collective force that fucked Kathy up. In particular, Kathy’s father, Leonard Boudin, a famous — him, too — leftist lawyer who represented Paul Robeson, Daniel Ellsberg and the revolutionary government of Cuba, is portrayed as a nightmarishly competitive and withholding dad who forced his children to turn radical handstands to get his love.

Braudy has a point here. In some of the rare fully sourced material in this book, Leonard Boudin comes across as a parent so narcissistic he tried to sabotage his own daughter’s achievements in athletics and foreign languages because they were among the few things he wasn’t good at. He snarled at Kathy’s high school French teacher because Kathy had said the woman was a “genius.” He openly seduced nearly every female friend Kathy brought home, and made Kathy and his son, Michael, compete for him with ever-larger, more extravagant and more famous political works. Michael Boudin grew up to be an ultraconservative judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and Braudy says Leonard nakedly preferred him to Kathy because his achievements were more mediagenic.

Full disclosure: I have my own family connection to the “aristocracy of the left.” When I was in high school, a close relative of mine was active in John Brown, and I tagged along to a few events that alternately bored me to tears, disturbed and attracted me. My relative’s friends were “older” lesbians (i.e., in their 20s) and one was extremely sexy and offered me a joint. The group’s confident preaching style and religious certainty (and even their searing criticisms) also attracted me, at the same time they made me want to dive for the exit. (Seeing them cheer at a video of a cop getting hit with a brick at a London riot made me gag, and not come back.) Later on, I and many other activists who encountered John Brown alumni in our movements of choice (the gay and AIDS movements in my case) found it difficult to refute arguments that came right out of the burning, pulsating core of John Brown-ers’ moral certainty, even when our own moral, political and intellectual compasses urged otherwise.

Because, for all I’ve been talking about star fucking on the left, a great deal of what makes people left stars has been that very confidence and moral certainty. Kathy Boudin had it, which made her utterly insufferable the one time I met her, interviewing her and other prisoners about the AIDS education group Boudin founded at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. But it also made her found the group, which did so much to improve the lives of women with AIDS behind bars that it seriously changes the way history should view her. Before that, HIV-positive women were harassed and isolated by other inmates, who believed they could get the disease by sitting next to them in the mess hall or using the same shower. Afterward, harassment ended, prisoners with AIDS were supported and often nursed by other inmates, and a peer advocacy group was set up that actually made sure prison authorities gave the right medications and care to anyone with the disease. The group, called ACE (AIDS Counseling and Education), has won numerous social justice awards and been copied in prisons across the country and around the world.

Thinking about this makes me not want to quote the various juicy bits and nasty insinuations that make this book prime beach reading for lefties, but not much good for any other purpose. Most of the assertions in “Family Circle” are unsourced, and where Braudy does give sources, she gives them in a peculiarly unsatisfactory way, in endnotes that say only things like “trial transcript” without identifying who in a trial said them, or that link an interviewee to a single word in a paragraph without giving sources for the much more dubious factoids several words away. She never quotes her documentary or interview sources, which might enable us to judge for ourselves whether the assertions are accurate. But, as I promised, there is gossip, and I’ll give a couple of examples just because I lack the high morality of John Brown-ers (for good and ill). To wit: Kathy dated Michael Meeropol (the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) in college! Leonard Boudin had a brief affair with Paul Goodman (so says Leonard’s old friend Bert Gross)! Kathy fell in love with a woman in prison (according to Kathy’s mother)! Joan Baez said Leonard sexually harassed her (according to one source)!

Sorry, Kathy. It’s hard to be a radical left superstar. But thanks for some of the work you’ve done.

Don’t even get me started on music videos. If you judge by our entertainment media, Americans find torture jazzy and titillating. Now, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But what’s truly weird about it is that we love watching depictions of an experience less likely to happen to us than to almost any other population in the world. Americans are not crueler than other people, or even more sadomasochistic. Why do we so like to fantasize about the terrible things that the rest of the world — oh, for example, Central Americans, Africans, and Bangladeshis — can readily undergo without the benefit of fantasy?

Part of it is the nature of torture itself, which breeds obsessive horror in all persons, everywhere — including Africans and Bangladeshis. Like us, those most likely to be its victims also spend long hours wondering what it might be like to have mice inserted into their bodies or to rationally, hopefully wish to die.

But in this country, most of us are so distant from torture as an everyday reality that our imaginings of it have the quality of a Sensurround thrill. The poet Carolyn Forche (who was, years ago, a human-rights observer in El Salvador), wrote that the only way to get entertainment-oriented Americans interested in news about that country was:

” … to give
them what they want: Lil Milagro Ramirez,
who after years of confinement did not
know what year it was, how she walked
with help and was forced to shit in public.
Tell them about the razor, the live wire,
dry ice and concrete, grey rats, and above all
who fucked her, how many times and when.”

Dianna Ortiz is one American whose relationship to torture is different. That’s because she was tortured in 1989, during a two-year stint in Guatemala as a young, politically unsophisticated nun from a Kentucky convent, teaching children to read in a rural province. She was abducted from a convent garden one morning by a U.S.-trained Guatemalan army captain, a police intelligence officer and their campesino torture temp, and installed in the secret basement of a police training institute called the Politecnica. (This was a regular site for torture conducted on orders of the military high command.)

They took Ortiz not because she was any kind of radical but simply because she was a garden-variety Catholic missionary working with the poor at a time when the military wanted to seriously scare the church. (Priests and nuns, human-rights workers, doctors, labor activists and randomly chosen campesinos had been tortured in Guatemala for decades, not so much to get information as to terrorize entire trades and populations.)

Ortiz was held for only 24 hours, unlike many other torture victims, whose ordeals last, incredibly, for months or even years. But those 24 hours resulted in a complete loss of memory of everything in her life prior to being tortured. She had to be reintroduced to her own parents, and she still has almost no memory of her childhood, her college years, how she became a nun, or her pre-torture friendships.

But she has intense memories of everything from her abduction onward. Ortiz’s book, “The Blindfold’s Eyes,” is an extraordinary, moving, sharply focused account of what it is actually like to be tortured and what the experience does to the rest of your life.

Though the book credits a co-writer — Patricia Davis — “The Blindfold’s Eyes” has a strong flavor of coming direct from Ortiz, without the rounded sentences or empty flourishes that are the usual hallmark of ghostwriters. The first-person voice is mordant, self-aware, tender, often bitterly funny, the opposite of the common stereotype of the trauma victim as a soggy bladder-bag of ugly feelings, unable to control any part of herself or her world, traumatized into nothingness.

In fact, what Ortiz tells us later about her need to control the way her story is told makes it likely that she was intimately involved in the production of every sentence. (Of course, figuring out whether to think of oneself as in or out of control of one’s abuse is the painful dialectic of all victims. If you think of yourself as having been in control of it, you’re fucked because it’s your fault. But if you realize you were out of control, you’re even more fucked, because it’s much more painful to have been victimized and not have been able to do anything more about it than merely to have been victimized.)

Paradoxically, Ortiz is strong enough to show us the times that she was helpless — not just during her imprisonment, but through many occasions of frantic self-hatred, flashbacks and just being profoundly not OK in the years afterward. Sometimes, the torturers talk to her late at night in her bedroom, before she goes to sleep. What I really admire in this book is Ortiz’s willingness to show that although she was not damaged utterly and entirely by the torture, she was indeed damaged.

So: what happened to her. This is the hard part to write about, although it’s not the hardest part of the book to read. Part of the problem is the fear of re-creating Ortiz’s experiences by writing about them — as though torture could be enacted simply by being thought of — but the other part is the fear of diminishing them through the reviewer’s hurried paraphrase or, worse, making them into another piece of S/M porn.

Before it begins, when they’re alone, the campesino asks her to forgive him for all the people he’s tortured and killed. When she won’t, he says he could have saved her if only she’d come across with absolution. Then the head torturer starts things off by calling her “mi amor.” They burn her over her entire body — including her breasts and probably her genitals. They rape her, of course. Many times. One of them sticks his penis in her wounds. Is my account becoming pornographic already? I’m trying to resist it, but it’s difficult, for reasons I’ll go into below — which have nothing at all to do with Ortiz.

They force Ortiz, who entered the novitiate at the age of 17, to jerk them off and perform oral sex. They hurt her in other ways she won’t describe. (The most chilling line in the book is in a different section, where Ortiz, casually explaining her fear of dogs, says, “Dogs were used in my torture in a way that was too horrible to share with anyone. Even now, I don’t talk about that part of the torture.”) And they put her in a pit of dying and dead people who’ve already been tortured — including children. Most damaging of all, they position Ortiz’s hands around a machete and force the machete, in her hands, into another torture victim, murdering the woman.

Writing about this, I find my words keep turning lurid and winking, or fetishized like a horror movie — the way that Andrea Dworkin’s catalogs of violence and rape turn into ultra-graphic porn because of the obsessed and florid way she writes about them. Why is it hard to avoid this (probably for both writers and readers)? I’m not pornographizing because of some peculiarly American fascination with exotic sufferings (I figured out) but because of the very nature of torture and the effect it has on everyone — even “unaffected” observers like me.

We inevitably sexualize and sensationalize torture, because it is one of the few ways to make that recalcitrant experience fit in our brains. Torture does something to the minds of all who experience it — even fifth-hand, vicariously, through a report. (That’s why it’s such an effective means of controlling entire societies.) Making it sexual, or thrilling and distanced like a kill in a video game, is one of the few ways of making it safe enough to contemplate.

In America, we are so shielded from the real thing that many of us have forgotten the difference between torture and our adventure comix of it, or why it’s important to keep them sorted out. S/M porn can be perfectly dandy — there’s a fair amount of it on my bookshelf — but there would be no need for it if there were no violence.

And while there’s no real emotional pain in a masturbation fantasy, there’s little room for heroism, either. But in the middle of Dianna Ortiz’s torture, something distinctly inimical to torture happens. While her tormentors take a break, she finds herself alone in a room with a figure curled under a bloodstained sheet. When Dianna pulls back the sheet, there is a woman who “opens her eyes, and they are light brown in the black and blue of her face. Her teeth appear in the crack of her swollen lips. She is trying to smile. I catch a sob in my throat and gently take her hand. Her breasts have been cut, and maggots are crawling in them.” The woman asks Dianna’s name, and says “Dianna, be strong.” They hold hands. “For what seems like hours, we hold on to each other.”

Extraordinarily, even in the midst of what’s been done to them, Dianna and this woman resist the perpetrators’ attempts to make them feel and act inhuman.

For torture, as the most strategic and deliberate of all acts of abuse, tries to create a narrative in which the victim is completely ugly and impossible to identify with — if you will, a sort of hate movie in which the torturer is the only possible hero, the only role a viewer can comfortably relate to. The victim is made to seem completely animal, disgusting, inhuman. In Ortiz’s case, the torturers have the gall to make a video of what they do to her so that she can be controlled by the shame its release would cause her. (Astonishingly, they are not afraid that the video might shame them.)

And she is controlled by the shame, in many ways. After her ordeal, she spends years feeling guilty. Yes, guilty. You get angriest at the torturers when Ortiz exquisitely delineates how hard it is for her not to blame herself for her own attack. “Sometimes I wonder … if I fought hard enough,” she stammers to her mother superior. “I feel like I contaminate people.” The guilt is even more intense in her case: Ortiz also feels evil because of the secret abortion she has when she winds up pregnant from the rapes, because of her forced “murder” (with the machete) of the other victim, and because she unwittingly told the torturers some information that may have imperiled an activist.

The reality of torture is, in fact, so hard to look at that many non-victims unconsciously believe that victims indeed are to blame. Shortly after her release, Ortiz goes to an American shrink who tells her to stop going on about torture — “You’re just feeling sorry for yourself.” A fellow nun from her order informs Ortiz that because she ignored death threats when she was in Guatemala, “If it’s anyone’s fault what happened to you there, it’s yours.”

But Ortiz finally does stop blaming herself. (You want to cheer when, near the end of the book, she comes to the conclusion that no one has a right to judge women who have abortions.) An entirely different side of this book details Ortiz’s battle — through two insanely brave lawsuits in Guatemala and one in the United States — to bring her abductors to justice and uncover U.S. government documents about her torture.

There are plenty. It turns out that federal investigators and State Department officials made an active effort to cover up her ordeal and to discredit her — understandably, as the United States is the major source of funding for the Guatemalan military. Her torture stopped when a man with an American accent entered the room and said in English, “Shit.” Then he said, in Spanish, to the torturers, “You idiots! Leave her alone. She’s a North American, and it’s all over the news.” To Ortiz he says, “You have to forgive those guys … they made a mistake.”

In the new story collection and novel, Le Guin drastically revises the politics of her archipelagan fantasy world, changing its outlook on gender, class and hierarchy. Can a fantasy world have an outlook?, you may ask. Certainly — just ask yourself if the elves are good in Tolkien, and if his trilogy believes in kings. Le Guin, who is now 72, has also drastically revised Earthsea’s worldview on death.

I loved the three original Earthsea books — “A Wizard of Earthsea,” “The Tombs of Atuan,” and “The Farthest Shore” — but the trilogy, like the “Tao Te Ching” itself, was a little quiescent about evil. In it, “keeping the balance” was always more important than fighting slavery or other human wrongs.

When wizards in the novels were smart, they did as little as possible and hung out in the woods. Action and power didn’t avail much. Note: this was also one of the best things about the trilogy. Few writers of epic fantasy would have dared to have a work end with the hero “neither losing nor winning” or, as in “The Farthest Shore,” with the same hero, Ged, completely losing his power.

Le Guin has always shown an openness to writing about loss, defeat and death, an openness that is extremely unusual (and refreshing) in the triumphalist world of fantasy. But fantasy is, on some level, always about triumph and especially the triumph over evil, and the trilogy’s main strength also makes it unsatisfying and on a certain level ethically troubling. (Here’s a corrective of my own: After Sept. 11, Le Guin’s Taoist refusal of triumph makes much more sense to me. Fantasies of ultimate victory over evil now seem more troubling.)

Then there was the novels’ attitude towards women. Though Le Guin is a feminist, her school for wizards, Roke, only admitted men, and women’s magic in her world was both “weak” and “wicked.” (The other deeply annoying thing was that Ged never became lovers with Tenar the Kargish girl who bravely renounces her position as a priestess of evil power, an act that’s typical of the very boldest things women get to do in Earthsea.) With “Tehanu,” a late addition to Earthsea published in 1990, and these two just-published books, Le Guin has taken care of all three problems. But fixing problems, as Le Guin would be the first to point out, is one of the most problematic things a writer can do.

“Tehanu” was awe-inspiring and infuriating at the same time because it introduced the notion of “a bad thing” (the burning, beating and rape of a child by her parents) into the pious, “good and evil are one” world of the Archipelago wizards. The abuse it detailed could not be looked at honestly in a way that could lead anyone to conclude that good and evil were one.

But in the process, the novel rather proved Le Guin’s earlier point. “Tehanu” is feminist, fascinating and daringly self-critical, but it is also didactic as sin. Its two heroines — Tenar, now adult and suddenly a housewife-Everywoman, and Tehanu, the abused little girl — were one-dimensional and generic. They were more embodiments of Le Guin’s politics than fully realized characters. Unlike Ged, they barely had shadows.

Eleven years later, Le Guin has come back to Earthsea again. This time she gets it righter. The story collection, “Tales From Earthsea,” is bracing. “The Finder,” the longest story, also tackles abuse, but embodies it much more successfully in myth. It is chilling and beautiful, a description of the slavery of a wizard — and most other people in his world — in the dark years before Roke was founded. Le Guin writes of 20-year-old Otter, forced to be a slave-wizard to a crazy mage named Gelluk who thinks mercury mining and the slow murder of his slaves through disease and starvation are the key to ultimate power and beauty. There are echoes of the Holocaust in Gelluk’s exultation in his enslaved refiners’ sores and diseased spittle, which he believes add to the mystical powers of the metal . He worships mercury as “the All-King.” In the time Le Guin is writing about, wizards — men and women both — are nearly all forced to serve wealth and power.

Le Guin’s descriptions of abuse in “The Finder” are so traumatic that they can almost not be read. Otter is constantly tortured with spells and beatings, and led around on a leash to do magic for Gelluk. A woman slave he meets, Anieb, is bald, naked, toothless and covered with sores — that’s what a 20 year-old looks like after only a year of labor as a mercury cooker.

Otter tries to find trust in the terrible place. There is immense beauty in the poems Le Guin makes up as nonsense scraps-nursery rhymes that are the record, hundreds of years later, of Otter’s efforts to flee. (They are a record the way that Humpty-Dumpty is a record.) Those efforts depend directly on his cooperation with women — some caring, rebellious women in particular, but also the entire gender at a time when women are the most oppressed people in his world — to save themselves and him:

There was a wise man on our hill,
Who found his way to work his will.
He changed his shape, he changed his name,
But ever the other will be the same.
So runs the water away, away,
So runs the water away.

I’m not going to give away the ending, but Le Guin goes into the founding of Roke, which is accomplished — surprise! — mostly by women. Much of the collection (as well as the novel, “The Other Wind”) details the subsequent history of Roke and how it came to ban women students and teachers. In the process we learn how “higher magery” itself came to be an art expected only of men, how the institution of Archmage was founded — and how it is an institution much more like that of Archbishop or Pope than readers might have imagined.

Perhaps my favorite revelation is the one about sex, and why throughout the Earthsea trilogy all the wizards (even sexy Ged) didn’t have it. We learn that the Archipelago wizards began putting spells on themselves and everybody else to keep the people around them from thinking about sex. This was after male mages decided wizardry should be purified of sexual energies and banned women from the school.

A nice story called “Darkrose and Diamond” is about wizard who falls in love even though he is supposed to be celibate, and also about the false idea that magic depends on cutting oneself off from all sorts of other powers — sexual, creative, parental. Delightful, also, is the factoid, given in an appendix, that Erreth-Akbe and Maharion were “heart’s brothers,” which apparently means gay lovers. This would be roughly equivalent to C.S. Lewis’s Oyarsa of Mars falling in love with his Oyarsa of Jupiter. A compelling final story, “Dragonfly,” is about the first girl who tries to get into Roke after the ban.

Partly, this is all lovely. I have always been troubled by the sexism of Earthsea, and it especially hurt when I read the trilogy for the first time at 24. But partly, it’s as though Tolkien had woken up 30 years later and written a new volume in which Gandalf’s wizardry is revealed to be a fundamentally corrupt institution and Bilbo is discovered to have raped a few young hobbits.

I’m not sure beautiful stories should be “corrected,” even when they are sexist, hierarchical and gross. It might possibly break a fundamental covenant between writer and reader for the author to “reveal” that her fantasy world was radically different, and far worse, than she had previously told us.

Thankfully, “The Other Wind” is not only about the sexism of Le Guin’s earlier world. Well, sexism is a major subject, as is the original, painful division between dragons and humans, who used to be part of the same species (sort of like the traumatic division of the lovers’ bodies in Plato’s “Symposium”). The exiling of humans and dragons from one another entails the separation of wisdom from wildness, morality from freedom. It is a much smarter version of the Fall, or as the truncated surviving species both call it, Verdunan, the division.

But mostly, “The Other Wind” is about death. Death was a big, big subject in the original Earthsea books as well, but Le Guin approaches it much differently here. And here her emendations do not seem ham-handed, but instructive, deeply interesting and moving. Alder, “a common sorcerer,” comes to visit Ged, who has long been without power. Alder has troubling dreams of the dead, especially his wife, who has kissed him across the “wall of stones” that Le Guin made so intensely real in the trilogy. (It is the wall that separates living and dead.)

But Alder loves his wife. He doesn’t mind kissing her, only that she is apart from him — and seems in pain, and begs him to “free her.” In the trilogy, the dead lived in a “dry land” where the mother did not touch her baby and lovers passed each other in the streets. In the trilogy, this did not seem so horrible, but here it does — as though death had come closer to Le Guin and through this novel, to the reader. A bit the way it felt closer to us in New York the other week.

Love, too, is much more central and important than in the other Earthsea books. The loss that all lovers face, even when they are completely constant and loving, is one of the aching subjects here. In the first few pages of the novel, Ged feels “a sadness at the very heart of things,” and in fact essential loss, essential grief is the main thing that “The Other Wind” is about — which makes me respect it immensely.

How to address that sadness is this novel’s question. As the book opens, something is changing — the dead didn’t used to be able to touch the living, but now Alder’s wife has touched and kissed him. Other dead people come to him in dreams and try to touch him, too. Also, something is happening with our cousins the dragons — they’re attacking the Archipelago en masse, when only a few of them used to attack before. And King Lebannen, still unmarried, has been sent an improbable, Middle Eastern-like, veiled bride from Kargad.

Tenar is the real hero here. She is elderly, and Ged is extremely elderly, and a great deal of the novel’s drama lies in whether she will manage to save the world and get home to Ged before one of them passes away.

I love this. It’s one of the most moving things Le Guin has written.

Death itself has changed in “The Other Wind “(as Alder has found out). Suddenly, the dead clamor to lose their names, to join with soil and rock, to meld with the world and to be reborn as something else, like the rest of creation. Those who remember the “Tombs of Atuan” will recall that the Kargish say that “the accursed-sorcerers,” that is, the people of the Archipelago, do not get reborn, as the Kargish do — they are damned eternally.

That is, they stay themselves forever, in “the dry land.” This turns out to be connected to the fact that they have “true names,” the essential foundation of the Archipelago’s wizardry. The true sadness of wizardry as it has been practiced in Le Guin’s world turns out to be that lovers cannot rejoin each other after death “in rocks, and stones, and trees. ”

Le Guin, writing now, finds these separations a problem, and for that I applaud her.