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homosexuality

Stephanie Shieldhouse

Map-Reading

She sounded good over the telephone. A soft rich alto voice, full grown. She was now twenty-​two. Benton was fifty-​one. A half-​sister he had never had a conversation with in his life. Kate. Katie. 

The Jack Bank

No, there will never be any shortage of labels; but at core, these academic designations will always remain, for me, rather bloodless. They will dance around my mind, flimsy moth-shadows; from time to time they will make cameo appearances in my conceptual framework—handy epithets with which to classify and organize the experience. By they will never embody it. For that I must dig deeper into my recollections, into the sights and smells and tastes of them, the imagery, texture, and moods of John, his voice, his cricket bat, and, at the end of it all, his jack bank.

Fear Itself: Meditations on Gay Marriage

One by one they came before the microphone, in bulky sweaters, down vests, business suits, blue jeans, their voices quaking with anger or fear. It was wrong, they said, and they tried to give the word powerful meaning, as if speaking it with extra force would make it persuasive. It was just wrong. And what they felt in the gut, they confirmed in the mind with the word of God himself.

T. E. Lawrence and the Character of the Arabs


In a letter of December 1910, the young T. E. Lawrence defined civilization as "the power of appreciating the character and achievements of peoples in a different stage than ourselves." No Englishman had a greater understanding of the past glory of Arab civilization and the modern contrast between nomads and city folk; of the desert tribes and customs; of homosexuality and asceticism, fanaticism and religion; of the Bedouin methods of warfare, their blood feuds, bribery, plunder, and massacres; of the heights and depths of the Arab character.