John Scagliotti introduced me to Margaret Cerullo, who has been, like John, a beloved friend and marvelous intellectual spark. Margaret introduced me to Pamela Bridgewater, who, like Margaret and John, complicated my thinking in almost every conversation until she died and, with her husband, Kweku Toure, magnified the meaning of family. The Nation, where I worked until 2000, introduced me to Alexander Cockburn, who introduced me to Laura Flanders, who introduced me to Amber Hollibaugh, a radiant earth angel of experience and knowledge, who helped me begin to make sense of ideas about class and sex and risk for which I didn’t have the words before going to Jamestown, New York, for the first essay in this collection. Jamestown introduced me to another Amber, another brave, searching soul, whose months of conversation from a jailhouse put spirit and bone to the contradictions of need and human error that tend to be lost in the blaring talk-talk about sex and danger.
Alexander, Alex now dead and gone, introduced me to many things—including the reporting of Debbie Nathan (and later to the incomparable Debbie)—but most profoundly to the riddles of love. The Nation re-introduced me to Lewis Lapham, the first editor who embraced me as a writer, offered money for a story and space to tell it properly. “The Secret Sharer,” “A Boy’s Life” and “Judgement Days” were first published in Harper’s. Lewis commissioned “Sin, a Story of Life” at the height of the priest scandal in Boston in 2002, but hated it; Virginia Heffernan, my editor there at the time, loved it, which had not seemed to be a disagreeably contentious overall response, but Lewis was the boss, and the piece went homeless. I include it here, rather than an adaptation that appeared years later in Legal Affairs (thank you, Emily Bazelon and the fact-checkers there), because Lewis’s frustrated but astute observation in the moment—“I think everyone is lying”—captures what I consider its strength. Many truths are embedded in scandal, but they are not to be found in the simple retelling or debunking of stories. There is pain here but there are no heroes, least of all among media SWAT teams whose aim, conscious or not, is not to encourage anyone’s independence but simply to replace one deference with another, one unquestioned authority with another. “Faith-Based Justice,” commissioned by Barbara Epstein for New York Review of Books, died with her, alas, and is included as an illustration of the travesty that occurs when the logic of scandal becomes the logic of a law court.
I met Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher and editorial director of The Nation, when we were practically girls, and I appreciate having grown up with her there. The title essay was her commission, and many other pieces here appeared in “Carnal Knowledge,” a feature she proposed. “Pictures from an Exhibition” and “The Wonder Years” first appeared in the Books section (thank you, Elsa Dixler and Art Winslow). “Make the Rules, Break the Rules and Prosper” was in CounterPunch (thank you, Jeffrey St. Clair). I have altered some titles or text, in the latter case often to restore material that was originally cut for space or split off in a sidebar. Although I have updated some bits in endnotes, overall these essays ought to be read in the context of their time.
The Nation presented more occasion for critical encounters with people across our long association than I can possibly acknowledge, but some not already named must be: Andy Kopkind (stardust now, who in bright life brought me to John), Richard Lingeman, Richard Kim, Don Guttenplan, Roane Carey, Judy Long (who also helped ready the text here), Sandy McCroskey, Peter Meyer (who also made the index possible), Zia Jaffrey, Jeff Sharlet, Susan Richardson, Carol Tavris, Leonore Tiefer, Maria Margaronis, Tracy Quan, Tia Keenan, Katha Pollitt (who doubtless disagrees with much here), Victor Navasky (who hired me as an intern), Janet Gold (who brought me on staff), Patricia Williams (a model of gracious fire, whose comments on the prologue I greatly appreciate), Judith Levine (who introduced me to Sex Panic and the Punitive State, by Roger Lancaster, who also commented on the prologue) and countless interns who not only checked facts but were a lively source of perspective. The same goes for everyone I worked with at Harper’s, especially Clara Jeffery and Bill Wasik, who were my editors.
I emphasize introductions to recognize the element of luck in this business. A working-class girl from Buffalo when I arrived in New York, I have been lucky. I was lucky before that, to have had a family where, okay, the kids were spanked, but also loved mightily and taught to stand up for ourselves. The chain of relationships and influences is more like the finest chainmail, interwoven, with no clear beginning or end. I have written on many subjects besides sexual politics, and, on that, much more than is included here. I have boundless gratitude toward every source for the essays that made it into this book and those that did not, and am indebted to many more friends, loved ones, chance encounters, the voices that figure into approaching any work. Of the beloved dead, whose voices stick and who were so important to me, I remember also Ben Sonnenberg, Edward Said and Jean Stein.
Three final great strokes of kismet: a South Carolina labor struggle prompted Bill Fletcher to urge me to pay attention, which prompted me to call Kamau Marcharia, who insisted I talk to Kevin Gray, then with the ACLU, with whom I’ve been talking, more or less, ever since. A call from John, who said, “You should talk to this guy who’s organizing gay opposition to the death penalty” after Matthew Shepard’s murder, led me to Bill Dobbs, who is not only an emporium of information about sex, civil illiberty and the exercise of free speech but also the best person to shop for hardware, or ring up from detention after a protest in New York. Finally, delightfully, a surprise email arrived from “across the sea,” sent by Rosie Warren, whose initiative, editorial insights and attention, together with the thoughtful work of everyone at Verso, made this book real. Thank you.
The little girls next door are playing school. The teacher barks, and the students get detention. There are so many ways to detention: being late, being wrong, being poor in math, wanting to be popular, “with your hair all fine and your nails painted and pretty clothes—I like pretty clothes and painted nails, too, but you aren’t all that.” The teacher threatens them all, “good or bad,” if they make her raise her voice again. She raises her voice. They are silent. She threatens to call their imaginary mothers. She threatens to take the imaginary money she’s been given to get them food. It is summer, hot, late afternoon. Detention is supposed to last four hours, three months, a year. A half hour, and the teacher flags. It’s not much of a game with one player. Okay, she announces, everyone can go to gymnastics. “Get in a line, class! No talking! Straight line!” The others obey. She arranges rolling garbage carts for them to jump off of onto the black-tar driveway. Happy shrieks conjure heaven for the first time, as a breeze comes up and an ice cream truck plays its wistful tune and a rat, which none of them sees, scuttles from one yard to the next. “Do it again,” the teacher shouts. “You. Are. In. Training!”
Let’s leave the little girls alone for now with their game, the meanings of which and the elaborate circuits of example, accommodation and rebellion it reflects are, in a sense, the pursuit of this book. I will return to them.
Let’s think, at the outset, on the meanings of more widely circulated reflections of reality in early twenty-first-century America. Three stories bumped up against one another as spring slid into summer of 2019, their coincidences unremarked upon, for all the words that each elicited in isolation. These stories are in no way equivalents. Their facts are necessary, but the stories coincide not at the level of fact; instead, together they represent a mood, a relationship—longstanding but specially adapted for delirious repetition and shapeshifting in the era of Trump and #MeToo—between the crowd and punishment.
On May 31, 2019, Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us premiered on television. A drama in four episodes, it tells the story of five man-children, aged fourteen to sixteen, at the center of a media storm in New York City in 1989 that was so powerful, so laden with the debris of assumption, prejudice, official and unofficial trickery, that it blocked the light for decades. In real time it was a story of tropes: a young investment banker, part of the city’s rising new class, went for a jog at night in Central Park;