by Olivia Laing
50 ‘a piece of life history . . .’: Wilhelm Reich, trans. Vincent R. Carfango, Character Analysis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990 [1933]) p. 154.
51 ‘a girlish mother . . .’: Chris Kraus, After Kathy Acker (Allen Lane, 2017), p. 44.
52 ‘On a very deep level, she couldn’t stand me’: Nina Burleigh, ‘Kathy Acker’, Chicago Tribune, 28 August 1988.
54 ‘My search for a way to defeat . . .’: Kathy Acker, ‘The Gift of Disease’, Guardian, 18 January 1997.
55 ‘It’s fantastic knowing . . .’: ‘Susan Sontag Found Crisis of Cancer Added Fierce Intensity to Life’, New York Times, 30 January 1978.
58 ‘What does make sense . . .’: Jonathan Cott, Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview, p. 8.
58 ‘Each woman responds to the crisis . . .’: Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (Aunt Lute Books, 1997 [1980]), p. 7.
60 ‘She remained unsheltered . . .’: Avital Ronell, in Amy Scholder, Carla Harryman and Avital Ronnell, eds., Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (Verso, 2006) p. 15.
60 ‘her reasoning here wasn’t flawless’: Chris Kraus, After Kathy Acker, p. 267.
61 ‘The first thing that I did . . .’: Kathy Acker, ‘The Gift of Disease’, Guardian, 18 January 1997.
63 ‘strange, chemical immortality’: David Rieff, Swimming in A Sea of Death, p. 16.
CHAPTER 3: SEX ACTS
70 ‘gold and inferno-red’: Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (Hogarth Press, 1954 [1939]), p. 296.
70 ‘Sodom and Gomorrah at a Prussian tempo . . .’: Norman Page, Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years (Macmillan Press, 1998), p. 86.
70 ‘you had this feeling that sexually. . .’: Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (Constable, 2008 [1996]), p. 35.
71 ‘the buggers daydream’: Norman Page, Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years, p. 14.
71 ‘To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys’: Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind: 1929–1939 (Magnum, 1977 [1976]), p. 10.
72 ‘natural’: ibid., p. 16.
72 ‘an intimate physical shame’: ibid., p. 13.
73 ‘This is what freedom is . . .’: ibid., p. 24.
73 ‘was the coming of warmth and colour . . .’: ibid., p. 39.
73 ‘a Black Forest of furniture’: ibid., p. 22.
74 ‘I suppose you wouldn’t care to have lunch here?’: ibid., p. 18.
74 ‘freakish fellow-tribesmen . . .’: ibid., p. 20.
75 ‘he encouraged his friends . . .’: ibid., p. 32.
76 ‘that which nearly strangled my heart’: Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Temple University Press, 2017), p. 40.
78 ‘I have always expressed the view . . .’: Charlotte Wolff, Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology (Quartet Books, 1986) p. 256.
79 ‘The number of actual and imaginable . . .’: Elena Mancini, Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 62.
80 ‘all love should be a private matter . . .’: Charlotte Wolff, Magnus Hirschfeld, p. 91.
81 ‘haunting grocery stores . . .’: Peter C. Engelman, ed., ‘Sanger’s Hunger Games: A Post-War German Odyssey’, The Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter, No. 61, Fall 2012.
81 ‘beautiful dwelling’: ibid.
82 ‘I had ceased to be . . .’: Wilhelm Reich, trans. Mary Boyd Higgins, Passion of Youth: An Autobiography, 1897–1912 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), p. 43.
82 ‘forced marriage’: ibid., p. 175.
83 ‘That thick?’: Christopher Turner, Adventures in the Orgasmatron, p. 94.
83 ‘It is not just to fuck . . .’: Wilhelm Reich, Reich Speaks of Freud, p. 37.
84 ‘The repercussions, the shock waves . . .’: Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life (Allen Lane, 2019), p. 175.
87 ‘Freud had to give up . . .’: Wilhelm Reich, Reich Speaks of Freud, p. 33.
89 ‘a gatekeeper’s house . . .’: Elizabeth Ann Danto, Freud’s Free Clinics (Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 95.
89 ‘From now onward . . .’: Wilhelm Reich, Reich Speaks of Freud, p. 51.
91 ‘What was new . . .’: Wilhelm Reich, trans. Philip Schmitz, People in Trouble (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976 [1953]), p. 108.
91 ‘the great freedom movement’: ibid., p. 118.
92 ‘individuals living under the same working conditions . . .’: ibid., p. 148.
94 ‘and especially towards homosexuals . . .’: Norman Haire, ed., World League for Sexual Reform: Proceedings of the Third Congress (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1930), p. 591.
94 ‘shrouded in darkness . . .’: Wilhelm Reich, People in Trouble, p. 17.
96 ‘most of those that now dominate . . .’: Patrick Wintour, ‘Genetics outweighs teaching, Gove adviser tells his boss’, Guardian, 11 October 2013.
96 ‘the best stock’: Alison Bashford and Lesley Hall, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Eugenics (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 5.
98 ‘They demanded whether or not tuberculosis . . .’: Wilhelm Reich, People in Trouble, p. 109.
98 ‘social struggle to eliminate . . .’: ibid., p. 111.
99 ‘There is no difference . . .’: Charlotte Wolff, Magnus Hirschfeld, pp. 404–405.
99 ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world . . .’: Theresa May, Conservative Party Conference, 5 October 2016.
99 ‘mentally . . . stupid’: Ralf Dose, Magnus Hirschfeld: The Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement (Monthly Review Press, 2014), p. 77.
99 ‘on the contrary . . .’: Elena Mancini, Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom, p. 69.
100 ‘asymmetry of face and head . . .’: Charlotte Wolff, Magnus Hirschfeld, p. 252.
101 ‘it would stamp out homosexuality . . .’: Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, p. 21.
101 ‘Hitler’s weather’: ibid., p. 96.
103 ‘as soon as Heinz has been . . .’: ibid., p. 152.
104 ‘Heinz is my one support . . .’: ibid., p. 109.
104 ‘I’d say it was the sort of letter . . .’: ibid., p. 124.
105 ‘importation, production, or sale . . .’: Atina Grossman, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 151.
105 ‘if the perpetrator through such deeds . . .’: ibid., p. 152.
106 ‘unworthy’: ibid., p. 152.
107 ‘Poison Shop’: ibid., p. 146.
CHAPTER 4: IN HARM’S WAY
111 ‘An object had been used to mutilate her . . .’: Daily Iowan, Vol. 106, No. 203, 14 May 1974.
113 ‘The authoritarian state has a representative . . .’: Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Columbia University Press, 2016 [1970]), p. 158.
113 ‘for lack of more inspired terminology . . .’: Barbara Hardy, ‘De Beauvoir, Lessing – Now Kate Millett’, New York Times, 6 September 1970.
113 ‘Anyone who would try to break . . .’: Angela Neustatter, Hyenas in Petticoats: A Look at Twenty Years of Feminism (Penguin, 1989), p. 24.
115 ‘and by real I mean I wanted . . .’: Stephanie Rosenthal, ed., Traces: Ana Mendieta (Hayward Publishing, 2013), p. 90.
117 ‘I think all my work has been like that . . .’: ibid., p. 90.
117 ‘A young woman was killed . . .’: Howard Oransky, ed., Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta (University of California Press, 2015), p. 82.
120 ‘You become unable to use language . . .’: Andrea Dworkin, Letters From a War Zone (E.P. Dutton, 1989), pp. 331–2.
120 ‘protect’: ibid., p. 330.
122 ‘just some bleeding thing cut up on the floor’: Andrea Dworkin, ed. Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, Last Days at Hot Slit (Semiotext(e), 2018), p. 296.
122 ‘turns anybody who is subjected to it . . .’: Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad (New York Review of Books, 2007), pp. 3–5.
123 ‘obstacles
that litter the path . . .’: Jacqueline Rose, ‘Feminism and the Abomination of Violence’, Cultural Critique, Vol. 94 (Fall 2016), pp. 4–25.
124 ‘more terrifying than rape . . .’: Andrea Dworkin, Last Days at Hot Slit, pp. 314–15.
124 ‘women who had been sleeping . . .’: ibid., p. 20.
126 ‘sexual terrorist’: Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (The Women’s Press, 1981), p. 100.
126 ‘In him, one finds rapist and writer . . .’: ibid., p. 70.
127 ‘far, far under the surface’: Andrea Dworkin, Last Days at Hot Slit, p. 314.
128 ‘sexual extravaganzas’: Andrea Dworkin, Pornography, p. 76.
128 ‘only doing what all men do’: Marquis de Sade, trans. Richard Seaver, Letters From Prison (The Harvill Press, 2000), p. 180.
128 ‘a spanking to a whore’: Andrea Dworkin, Pornography, p. 82.
128 ‘a sore behind’: ibid., p. 82.
128 ‘a rather disagreeable hour or two’: ibid., p. 84.
129 ‘a woman so badly wounded . . .’: Geoffrey Gorer, The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade (Peter Owen, 1963), p. 28.
129 ‘the sort of girls . . .’: Neil Schaeffer, The Marquis de Sade: A Life (Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 185.
129 ‘advocacy and celebration of rape and battery . . .’: Andrea Dworkin, Pornography, p. 99.
129 ‘by its bedrock conviction . . .’: ibid., p. xxxvii.
130 ‘de Sade and sexuality . . .’: Edmund Gordon, The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography (Chatto & Windus, 2016), p. 219.
130 ‘as long as a year to complete it’: ibid., p. 220.
132 ‘Throughout the literature on him . . .’: Andrea Dworkin, Pornography, pp. 88–9.
133 ‘leeches always lying in wait . . .’: Marquis de Sade, trans. Will McMorran and Thomas Wynn, The 120 Days of Sodom (Penguin Classics, 2016 [1785]), p. 3.
133 ‘One of Sade’s cruellest lessons . . .’: Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (Virago, 1992 [1979]), p. 89.
136 ‘I think that he really didn’t understand . . .’: Jonathan Cott, Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview, p. 41.
136 ‘From now on, sexuality is indeed distorted . . .’: Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Noonday Press, 1970), cited in Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Allen Lane, 1974), p. 212.
137 ‘only (!) the sound . . .’: Wilhelm Reich, Passion of Youth, p. 31.
137 ‘deep groan’: ibid.
137 ‘ghastly scenes . . .’: ibid., p. 35.
139 ‘the only male one to abhor rape really’: Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, p. 179.
140 ‘the darkness of the pre-verbal realm’: Edward St Aubyn, At Last, p. 171.
140 ‘the ur-figure of so-called anti-sex feminism . . .’: Johanna Fateman, ‘The Power of Andrea Dworkin’s Rage’, New York Review of Books, 15 February 2019.
141 ‘Angela’s socialist consciousness . . .’: Edmund Gordon, The Invention of Angela Carter, p. 218.
141 ‘I think some of the Sisters . . .’: ibid., p. 217.
143 ‘I had played a game . . .’: Angela Carter, ‘The Bloody Chamber’, in Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories (Chatto and Windus, 1995 [1979]), p. 137.
143 ‘The blade did not descend . . .’: ibid., p. 142.
146 ‘I don’t think that you can separate . . .’: Ana Mendieta, in Linda Montano, ed., Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties (University of California Press, 2001), p. 396.
146 ‘announcing that women . . .’: A.I.R., ‘Short History’, www.artgallery.org/shorthistory.
147 ‘My wife is an artist . . .’: Robert Katz, Naked by the Window: The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), pp. 11–12.
148 ‘You see, I am a very successful artist . . .’: ibid., p. 4.
149 ‘Do you know the art . . .’: ibid., p. 340.
149 ‘in which she depicted . . .’: ibid., p. 330.
150 ‘Why does everybody think . . .’: Chris Kraus, I Love Dick (Semiotext(e), 2015), p. 211.
150 ‘Submission can be refused and I refuse it’: Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, p. xxxii.
151 ‘Do it with a size 5 feet . . .’: Stephanie Rosenthal, Traces: Ana Mendieta (Hayward Publishing, 2013), pp. 200–201.
CHAPTER 5: A RADIANT NET
156 ‘Now I’m very clear that the object is freedom’: Agnes Martin, ‘The Untroubled Mind’, in Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances (Phaidon, 2012), p. 216.
159 ‘the darkness wiped me out . . .’: Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (Harper Collins, 2006 [1971]), p. 214.
160 ‘a tiny orgone box of a room . . .’: Terry Castle, ‘Travels with My Mom’, London Review of Books, 16 August 2007.
160 ‘full-scale interplanetary battle’: Christopher Turner, Adventures in the Orgasmatron, p. 374.
161 ‘I am doing my best . . .’: Reich to Eisenhower, 23 February 1957, Aurora Karrer Reich Collection, National Library of Medicine.
162 ‘Freud wanted nothing of politics . . .’: Wilhelm Reich, Reich Speaks of Freud, p. 54.
163 ‘what my father finds offensive . . .’: Christopher Turner, Adventures in the Orgasmatron, p. 142.
163 ‘a horrible triage centre . . .’: Elizabeth Ann Danto, Freud’s Free Clinics, p. 259.
164 ‘I lost literally all . . .’: Wilhelm Reich, People in Trouble, p. 232.
166 ‘as a theory of the psychological . . .’: Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p. 69.
166 ‘at the bottom of an ocean of orgone energy’: Wilhelm Reich, American Odyssey: Letters and Journals, 1940–1947 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), p. 34.
168 ‘those straight genital Reichians . . .’: William Burroughs, Letters, 1945–59 (Penguin Modern Classics, 2009), p. 19.
169 ‘I tell you Jack . . .’: ibid., p. 51.
169 ‘very organic, like a fur-lined bathtub’: William Burroughs, ‘My Life in Orgone Boxes’, in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (Arcade, 1993), p. 166.
169 ‘It seemed to me that people . . .’: James Baldwin, Collected Essays (Library of America, 1998), p. 662.
170 ‘I still dream of Orgonon’: Kate Bush, ‘Cloudbusting’, Hounds of Love (1985).
170 ‘the new cult of sex and anarchy’: Mildred Edie Brady, ‘The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy’, Harper’s Magazine, April 1947.
172 ‘when faced with the relatively minor . . .’: James S. Turner, ed., The Chemical Feast: Ralph Nader’s Study Group Report on the Food and Drug Administration (Penguin, 1976), p. 1.
172 ‘I request the right to be wrong’: Wilhelm Reich, American Odyssey, p. 442.
172 ‘perpetually enjoined and restrained from’: Wilhelm Reich et al. v. United States of America, US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, 1957.
173 ‘the first human beings to engage . . .’: Peter Reich, A Book of Dreams, p. 31.
174 ‘I’m not a woman . . .’: Jill Johnston, ‘Surrender & Solitude’, The Village Voice, 13 September 1973.
174 ‘I’m not a woman, I’m a doorknob’: ibid.
175 ‘deep voice . . .’: David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 130.
176 ‘was terrified . . .’: Henry Martin, Agnes Martin: Pioneer, Painter, Icon (Schaffner Press, 2018), p. 94.
176 ‘sociopathic personality disturbance’: Jack Drescher, ‘Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality’, Behavioural Science, Vol. 5, Issue 4, Dec. 2015, pp. 565–75.
177 ‘You feel as if you’ve climbed . . .’: Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin, p. 68.
177 ‘the Slip, like Taos . . .’: ibid., p. 73.
179 ‘the guys there were so beautiful . . .’: Lucian Truscott, ‘Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square’, The Village Voice, 3 July 1969.
179 ‘defend the fairies’: ibid.
180 ‘the satisfaction of appetite happens to be impossible’
: Agnes Martin, ‘The Untroubled Mind’, in Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin, p. 216.
182 ‘Everything falls in a tremendous shower . . .’: Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Vintage Books, 2004 [1931]), p. 137.
182 ‘conceptual traffic jam . . .’: Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Life’s Work’, New Yorker, 7 June 2004.
183 ‘My paintings are about merging, about formlessness . . .’: Ann Wilson, ‘Linear Webs’, Art & Artists, Vol. 1, No. 7 (October 1966), p. 47.
183 ‘Solitude and independence for a free mind’: Agnes Martin, ‘The Untroubled Mind’, in Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin, p. 220.
184 ‘Fifteen minutes of physical abrasion’: Jenny Attiyeh, ‘Agnes Martin: An Artist on Her Own’, Horsefly, Spring 2001.
184 ‘I can’t deal with distraction . . .’: Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin, p. 77.
185 ‘you make me feel mighty real’: Sylvester, ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’, Step II (1978).
186 ‘My mother didn’t like children . . .’: Benita Eisler, ‘Life Lines’, New Yorker, 25 January 1993.
186 ‘Nature is like parting a curtain . . .’: Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell, eds., Agnes Martin (Tate Publishing, 2015), p. 232.
187 ‘Reality may be denied . . .’: Edith Jacobson, ‘The Self and the Object World: Vicissitudes of Their Infantile Cathexes and Their Influence on Ideation and Affective Development’, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Vol. 9, Issue 1, 1954, p. 115.
187 ‘A great day in Puerto Rico yesterday . . .’: @realdonaldtrump, Twitter, 4 October 2017.
187 ‘Wow, so many Fake News . . .’: @realdonaldtrump, Twitter, 4 October 2017.
188 ‘Wilhelm Reich was living in a dream world’: Box 2, Folder 12, Aurora Karrer Reich Collection, National Library of Medicine.
188 ‘In 1956 WR believed himself a spaceman’: ibid.
188 ‘WR had massive delusions of grandeur . . .’: ibid.
188 ‘You, are you not deeply ashamed of your own rotten nature . . .’: ibid.
188 ‘Watch out . . .’: ibid.
189 ‘The pile was crumpled and broken . . .’ Peter Reich, A Book of Dreams, p. 66.
190 ‘Willie violent and threatening . . .’: Box 2, Folder 12, Aurora Karrer Reich Collection, National Library of Medicine.
190 ‘What gets passed off as the effects of Oranur . . .’: ibid.