“In his suit, with his pigtail and his montera, he was pure potential: he could be masculine vanquisher or gold-embroidered fairy. He was both, actually, at all times, and nobody who came to see him fight thought any less of him for it.”

Guernica

“Does prosperity preclude realism? Could these people suffer the nihilism of despair if America was really working for them? Or could it be that it’s fashionable to have progressive politics, that these people wanted to claim good-heartedness with a vote and nothing more? In truth, there was no one way to categorize them, other than that they all made me feel bad, both for what I had and what I didn’t have.”

“Vanessa’s videos were different from anything I’d ever seen. The women had ideas and Vanessa let them act the ideas out. Rope, leather, buckles, straitjackets, Lycra, latex, gas masks, ball gags, rubber gloves, hoods, duct tape, vibrators, swings, saran wrap. And when the women came no one told them not to make noise. And other women made them come. And they talked to each other, told each other their ideas, said they were feeling great about their ideas.”

“That night I dreamed of being arraigned. I dreamed of wearing handcuffs; I’d worn them before, though only once, and not in court. I dreamed of my mother annihilated by humiliation, my father pale with anger. I dreamed of what haunts the lives of millions of Americans, some of whom look like me but many of whom don’t: my freedom curtailed. The apocalypse of the cage.

When you’re an addict, the world ends and begins again a million times over.”