LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Collected here are comments of general interest made on individual articles. LTTE will highlight reader information, insights, questions and answers regarding any aspect of Greek love history and literature. Please feel free to comment from this page (some editing may be involved).
Anonymous 90, 25 February 2022
www.academia.edu/4905297/Pinning_Anal_Se...ks_A_Millennial_Slur
Pinning Anal Sex On The Greeks: A Millenial Slur
Edmund Marlowe, 25 February 2022
Have you bothered to read the comments preceding your own? Certainly you haven't bothered to give yourself even the most simplistic knowledge of the evidence or you would not, in mindless repetition of others, cite this tired drivel in oblivion of what others have written. This article is by a scholar whose often otherwise sound judgement has been sadly compromised by a manic lifelong obsession with misrepresenting this one matter, so manic indeed that he can hardly write anything at all on ancient Greece without introducing it. I already demolished the supposed "case" in the article on this website Did the Greeks Pedicate their Loved Boys? In fact I did so much too weakly, not then yet aware of the full weight of the evidence showing how utterly pathetic is the argument that the Greeks disdained pedicating boys. I hope later this year to have my article replaced with a much more forceful and detailed repudiation of this nonsense.
I am entirely open to debate, but any worthwhile debate has to be founded on primary sources, not parroting of dishonest 21st century propaganda.
* * *
Editor, 26 February 2022
The article cited by Anonymous 90 appears to be the basis for Anonymous 29's earlier claim. Perhaps they are the same chap and indeed the author of the article himself? Anybody is most welcome to undertake the task of challenging Mr. Marlowe's arguments contending that the Greeks pedicated their eromenoi, but I affirm that if the debate is to be worthy of notice on this site, it must be based on evidence from Greek sources, and further comments on the subject must offer something new here if they are not to be deleted. Anyone who does have anything to add to the debate is kindly asked to do so on the relevant webpage Did the Greeks Pedicate their Loved Boys? Anything more worth saying on this topic will be too specialist for retention on the home page.
* * *
Dale Bach Saturday, 16 June 2018
Interesting. This is in line with a Scientific American article showing the strong likelihood that all human male primates were originally bisexual (and women too for that matter), as is in accord with the bisexuality of our two closest primate relatives (chimps and bonobos). That natural impulse from birth onwards was then reinforced by the natural sex play games of all children, that had originally proceeded indiscriminate of gender in the original foraging cultures (because there was simply no sense of impropriety regarding affectionate sexual touches of any kind).
* * *
In Umbris Wednesday, 7 November 2021
There is so much here to digest, I am taken aback.
Interestingly, many comments reflect the spirit of the age--we close our minds to issues that are not politically and socially acceptable. We accept the rewriting of history without thinking.
The curious thing (to me) is the social and cultural advances of the Ancient Greeks came about because of critical thinking, not accepting the status quo, and reaching out for superior 'modes' of understanding, whether for love or political systems. This approach of querying the norm in inspiring ways is also the essence of creative thinking.
When you realize that Christianity has formed most western attitudes and is founded on the singular principle of 'believe what I say,' it is easy to understand how we arrive at the current situation. Young males are now second class citizens, without purpose and direction. They are doomed until the next renaissance.
Write comment (0 Comments)
A LETTER ON BOY PROSTITUTION IN PARIS, 1846
Anonymous 86, 9 February 2022
Can anyone tell me anything about the last statue depicted in the article?
Editor, 13 February 2022
Following your query, it has been suggested to me by a good authority that this statue is probably by Dutch sculptor Wim van der Kant, but it can't yet be confirmed. It certainly looks to me very much in his style.
17 February 2022
An expert has now been consulted and has corrected the suggested attribution. The statue is known as "boy with a belt", and "is the work, considered to be the most important, of the Norwegian sculptor Lars Utne (1862-1922)." In case you are interested, the first statue of the boy with the butterfly was titled "Joyance" and "it was the work of the Welsh sculptor William Goscombe John, a follower of New Sculpture."
Write comment (0 Comments)
Helen Shloimovitz Ferrieux, 5 February 2022
My husband was appointed French Master at Eton in 1959, and I joined him as is wife at the âge of 19...hardly older than the boys. I was pretty as a teenager and attracted a lot of attention.....from the Masters as well as the youngsters! Sir Ranulph Fiennes had grown into a tall, manly and very attractive Etonian who, alas, never invite me to tea, as many others did ! The only contact I had with him was when I was standing in front of Tudor Stores with a collection tin for the RSPCA.
Harry Lascelles, 6 February 2022
What a delightful reminiscence! Thank you.
Write comment (0 Comments)
Nineteene Yeares Travayles by William Lithgow
In Palestine, Lithgow won't speak of the "twofold kind of voluptuous abomination" practiced with female prostitutes, lest it give innocent northern minds funny ideas. But he boldly records all the boy-buggering going on in Italy, Constantinople, Cairo, Morocco, Malta and Hungary (the whole southern world in fact). Does this suggest Lithgow thinks sex with boys already common knowledge in northern lands? No innocence to be saved when it comes to pederasty? And is it a lesser evil than sodomy with a woman? (If I'm even reading him right.)
Also, he makes two interesting climate-related comments. In Morocco they open three thousand boy brothels in the summer time. In Rome, sodomitical Sixtus grants his cardinals the use of boy brothels for the three hot months. (One assumes he's referring to the temperature of the air, not the cardinals.) It smacks of Richard Burton's sotadic zone. In the torrid tropics, boy as breezy refreshment becomes irresistible?
And more: the introduction to Persia quotes from a 1082 text where a father gives advice to his son. Part of that advice is for the young man not to limit his inclinations to either women or boys, but to enjoy both. Dad gets quite specific in fact: "During the summer let your desires incline toward youths, and during the winter toward women."
Third time's a charm!
A turtle's gender is determined by the temperature of the egg in which it grows. Could boysexuality be similarly configured? The beautiful boy partly represents the dream of transcending the gross materiality of procreative sex. This is nowhere better exemplified than in the heat-seared lands of premodern Arabic Islam, with its thousand years of Platonic boy-love poetry. So when the temperature rises dangerously high, perhaps a boy is the only chance of escaping hell on earth.
If it's true, if high temperatures promote boy-love...it would certainly explain the millenarian hysteria surrounding Global Warming. Our house is on fire! Break the glass!
Edmund Marlowe, 28 January 2022
"Does this suggest Lithgow thinks sex with boys already common knowledge in northern lands? No innocence to be saved when it comes to pederasty?"
My guess is that this is right. Surely, almost all northerners would have heard of sodomy, if only from the fulminations of their preachers? And since, everywhere that we know of then, it was taken for granted that men having sex with boys would sodomise them, the longing for sex with a boy would have been seen as the obvious cause of sodomy. Weren't man/boy sex and sodomy thus almost synonymous in the early modern mind? The incentive to sodomise women would surely be very slight in a society where you could hang for it and your soul be damned while there were no disincentives to enjoying coitus with your wife or a whore. Quite possibly sodomising a woman had never occurred to most northerners. It would be interesting to have some evidence though.
"And is it a lesser evil than sodomy with a woman?"
Maybe not, but more understandable?
"Weren't man/boy sex and sodomy thus almost synonymous in the early modern mind?"
Men, in a lot of ways, are the simpler sex. Up until a short time ago, when a man was sexually aroused, by either woman or boy, what he experienced was a desire for penetrative sex. It makes biological sense and tracks back to our primate forebears well enough. The law's attempts to restrain or extirpate homosexual behaviour seem built upon on this notion. Anything other than successfully achieved sodomy gets a lesser sentence, often by a significant margin. It's as though acts like masturbation and oral sex are seen as "gateway drugs", likely to lead to the real thing. Even in Platonic-tending Arabic-Islam, where the (official) goal was to divert a natural lust for boys to spiritual ends, there was often a tolerance for low-level erotic interactions--kissing, fondling, etc--as long as the final sodomitical line was never crossed.
It probably speaks to a more physically intimate time. It was commonplace, right up to the early twentieth century, for males of all ages to share a bed at night. A certain amount of boy-boy, man-boy frigging around would surely have been as unremarkably expected as solo masturbation is today for boys. One doesn't need to admit to it, or talk about it, but it would be there as one of the many bodily functions our fallen natures are heir to.
Sodomy, though, is serious. It is the full sexual act, complementary to that with a woman. The cultural phobia attached to sodomy starts with the Zoroastrians and the Hebrew Patriarchs--both are obsessed with sodomy's treachery toward procreation and the desperate desire to populate the land, to produce offspring "as numerous as the stars in the sky." Given that boy-love was always far more visible than men's relations with women, it wouldn't be hard for scare campaigns to gain momentum. The important element of disgust that also attaches to sodomy comes, I think, from a more general source: the rational mind is always ready to start back in horror at our murkier biological realities. Give rationality an inch and it'll take to screeching from on high. Add a Protestant twist and the hunt will truly be on!
Which makes the modern situation interesting. A pederast such as Michael Davidson is typical in preferring not to pedicate his boys, and has only done it when a boy insists. Is this the deeper taboo against sodomy at work? A sort of Platonic trade-off with one's own tortured psyche? Hard to believe, actually (particularly in Davidson's case), especially now that any man-boy sexual activity is given the full status of unregenerate evil.
Maybe it comes from a broader cultural trend. Masculinity is, according to one's point of view, either in decline or on the way to a better, less-binary, less toxic future. The declining rates of sexual activity amongst young adults, which is generally applauded, show we may even get there one very quiet day.
Edmund Marlowe, 31 January 2022
There are many fascinating insights in this explanation. However, I would suggest you have misdiagnosed the position of modern pederasts and the nature of men’s longings with respect to sodomising boys has run too deep to be much affected by culture.
Michael Davidson wrote in the postscript to Some Boys, “active buggery, and even the desire for it, are rare among true boy-lovers (though frequent among the pseudo-queers, like the Arabs).” The Arabs, as generalised here, were pseudo-queers and not true boy-lovers in two senses that make them typical of the overwhelming majority of pre-modern men who have been sexually involved with boys. First, when the circumstances were favourable, they were just as enthusiastic sexually with women. Secondly, they were not a small or self-conscious sexual minority: in many Arab societies, as in ancient Greece etc., it was considered normal to be attracted to boys.
Rather than showing that he and his ilk disdained sodomy because they were modern, what Davidson said was actually an acknowledgement that they, as a tiny sexual minority, were fundamentally different in their sexual disposition to the majorities, ancient and modern, who have involved themselves with both boys and women.
I don’t know if you and Davidson are right that he was typical of the modern modern exclusive pederast in this respect. Certainly, there have been other writers like him (André Gide, John Henry Mackay, Angus Stewart), but Joe Orton and Casimir Dukahz would surely protest loudly against this. If you are right, then I would say this is not because of a “deeper taboo” today, but because, due to the severe repression of pederasty in modern times, a grossly disproportionate number of men still wanting to involve themselves with boys have been exclusive pederasts.
However, I would venture the proposition that men who at any time in their lives have known sexually fulfilment with both women and boys (and are therefore more representative of the “historical” pederast) almost invariably long to sodomise boys. Among notable modern writers, I would cite the examples of Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Douglas, Norman Douglas, Roger Peyrefitte, Jonathan King and Gabriel Matzneff. The last is the best example because he has been clear about being enthusiastic for sex with boys while usually preferring girls and explicit that he could only find sexual fulfilment with a boy through sodomising him.
Can you think of a single contrary case which would disprove my contention, ie. a modern who was sexually enthusiastic with both women and boys and did not like to sodomise boys?
Finally, I suggest the difference in sexual nature between exclusive pederasts and the majority is not just modern. The voice of the tiny minority represented by the former is rarely preserved in history, but Rocke in his Forbidden Friendships, noted the correlation between the rare exclusives, called “inveterate sodomites” in Renaissance Florence, and those recorded as fellating their boys.
In summary, as regards the large majority of men, I would take the first six words out of your “Up until a short time ago, when a man was sexually aroused, by either woman or boy, what he experienced was a desire for penetrative sex.”
Yes, an important point, the preponderance today of exclusive pederasts. And it's probably not profitable to speculate on the place sodomy would hold if the fierce suppression was eased (not that it'll stop me!). The incidence of exclusive homosexuality has definitely increased over the last century or so--and who knows how many androphilic gays would prefer boy-love relationships if they didn't spell social death.
Amongst the premodern Arab-Islamic educated classes, a lot of "pseudo-queers" were loving boys without experiencing the desire to pedicate them. I'm not convinced that culture can't affect the way one experiences desire--within biological limits, of course. A lot of men today feel sexual desire only for adult women, and would be repulsed and disgusted at the idea of sex with a girl in early adolescence--which is quite a feat of self-engineering!
I can't prove it of course, but if in 1980 we'd pursued a path of increasing tolerance rather than increasing hysteria, we'd still see sodomy being a minority practice -- pederasty only stood a chance if it took on a Platonic-Arabic type quality, which would allow it to exist within the broader cultural desire to de-toxify masculinity.
I've never been sure exactly what Davidson meant in the quote you provided. A "true boy-lover", according to Davidson, isn't necessarily an exclusive pederast, is he? A little before that quote he defined a true boy-lover as a man "whose principal concern is the boy's happiness and well-being". Surely he'd have been aware that throughout history this role has been primarily filled by bisexually responsive men?
So perhaps "pseudo-queer"--odd choice of term--refers to men who will as a matter of convenience use a boy to get off, but develops no deeper emotional connection. So his main point of division is between men who are only interested in physical gratification--and likely to favour pedication--as opposed to those who are more interested in a full love affair--and not interested in pedication. I don't think history supports this, but it does throw up the most interesting question: Why are exclusive pederasts less likely to desire pedication?
Edmund Marlowe, 1 February 2022
To answer your last question, I don’t of course know and I don’t believe anyone does, but, since you’ve asked, I’ll hazard what may be two contributing factors. To do this effectively, however, I’m going to have to resort to the word “fuck” because it alone expresses the emotional and physical equivalence that men who like both women and boys feel in penetrating both. I must also reiterate your points that, this is how men have usually wanted to quench their desire and that it makes biological sense, and add that, because that is so, the experience will tend to be found much more satisfying than alternatives: it unites in ecstasy two humans as intimately as is possible.
First, then, I posit that almost all men sexually attracted to women have at some point fucked one. Having had this experience, any other sexual act, whether with women or boys, will seem far less exciting. (Incidentally, if there were Arabs who did not want to fuck boys despite knowing what it was like with women, I would suggest that was simply because they did not wish to burn in hell. Hence why some of them were preoccupied with the possibility they might be allowed this joy in paradise, just as they were promised wine there). By contrast, a lot of men (but by no means all) who are exclusive pederasts have been put off sodomy for the various reasons you’ve already gone into and have been unable to discover what they were missing out by getting the nearly identical experience with women. Anecdotally, I’ve heard of cases of exclusive pederasts with misgivings trying it out and subsequently being unable to find fulfilment with any other sexual act. But many exclusives have never given themselves the chance.
Secondly, many, probably most, writers say the appeal of boys is their androgyny. But amongst those who find androgyny most exciting, pederasts, there must be variations in taste. Is it not intuitive that those attracted to the more feminine qualities of the boy are more likely than those attracted to his more masculine qualities to like women too and to want to do the thing with boys most similar to what that they would like to do with women?
Davidson apparently saw sodomy as a pseudo-heterosexual act. I see what he was getting at, but I reject his phrasing (it is, above all, a pederastic act) and I don’t see a scrap of evidence for supposing sodomitical pederasts or pederasts who were capable of loving women loved their boys any less. Hence I think it was pure vanity on Davidson’s part to disdain as not “true boy-lovers” those whose longings he did not share.
"if there were Arabs who did not want to fuck boys despite knowing what it was like with women, I would suggest that was simply because they did not wish to burn in hell."
I don't think that does justice to the thousand year tradition that developed amongst the poets, scholars, etc. I agree suppression of natural desire helps form this tradition, but it develops into a self-reinforcing, self-perpetuating culture where the men are experiencing their attraction to boys in exactly the way they're celebrating in their poetry. If they were simply restraining themselves in order not to go to hell, I doubt they'd have been able to achieve the sort of transcendental rapture so often apparent. That comes from their sexual energies being fully invested in their chaste ideal.
"a lot of men (but by no means all) who are exclusive pederasts have been put off sodomy for the various reasons you’ve already gone into and have been unable to discover what they were missing out by getting the nearly identical experience with women."
Yes, and I would probably go further and say exclusive pederasts are proactively unwilling to discover that which they refuse to participate in. An exclusive attraction to boys shows a pronounced swerve away from woman and the procreative imperative. The boy comes to represent a divine escape from gross biology. So any road that hints at leading back to woman must be a path not taken! Davidson tried sodomy, but wasn't a fan, and his equating it with heterosexual intercourse makes sense psychologically.
But it's worse than "pure vanity" on Davidson's part. He's constructed his view of pederasty purely on the activities of himself and his acquaintances. This is the parochial method that has allowed the insane levels of phobia today to become received wisdom. Boysexuals over the last century have not been well served by a lack of interest in their own history.
You say bisexual men are more attracted to feminine qualities in a boy and homo-men more attracted to masculine qualities. Intuitively it does make sense. But does it then follow that bisexual men will prefer effeminate boys? That doesn't sound right, particularly when one considers the very wide range of ways boys present themselves in various pederastic cultures--from the vigorously martial to the virtually transgender effeminate. I wonder if there wouldn't be more meaningful variation within the exclusive pederasts as a group, and within bisexuals as a group, than between the two groups.
Edmund Marlowe, 4 February 2022
“That comes from their sexual energies being fully invested in their chaste ideal.”
I don’t see the contradiction, as I would have thought this was a case of making a virtue out of the need for salvation. But more importantly, if these particular Arabs were pursuing a chaste ideal, then they were not an example of men who declined sodomy with boys in favour of less “serious” forms of sex with boys (which is what I thought this debate was about), but of a much older and deeper debate as to whether any kind of sex with boys was permissible or desirable. Two quite separate issues are being confused here.
“exclusive pederasts are proactively unwilling to discover that which they refuse to participate in”
But this is greatly over-stating the case. Many exclusive pederasts have been very keen on sodomising boys. I’ve already given examples (not many, simply because exclusives are relatively rare in the surviving historical record). I don’t think there’s any evidence to support a statement in this regard stronger than “some exclusive pederasts have shown a disinclination to sodomise boys that has been very rare among men attracted to women as well as boys.” What Davidson says must be taken with a pinch of salt. As you’ve pointed out, he did in private admit to having sodomised boys twice, while in his public writing for Some Boys he claimed he was constitutionally incapable of the act. I think he was deliberately exaggerating because he was keen to contest the popular image of pederasts as sodomites (an Oxford Dictionary definition at the time). And who were these acquaintances? He knew perfectly well that Robin Maugham, his most constant pederastic friend, was fond of sodomising boys, because he helped Maugham write his memoirs which reveal this.
"The boy comes to represent a divine escape from gross biology. So any road that hints at leading back to woman must be a path not taken!"
Here I think you've come up with a very interesting additional reason why some exclusive pederasts may have rejected sodomy.
“But does it then follow that bisexual men will prefer effeminate boys?”
No, I agree it doesn’t, but I didn’t say that. First of all, I never used the word “bisexual”, which I think deeply misleading to describe the majority of pre-modern men who saw being attracted to both women and boys as quite normal and had little notion of any sexuality to be divided into two. Secondly, you’ve again put it much too strongly. I merely hazarded a guess that they were more susceptible to the attraction of the more feminine type of boy than exclusive pederasts are. I would expect both types to be most attracted to boyish boys if their taste for boys was at all strong, with feminine-looking (not necessarily effeminate) boys as more usual second-choice than manly-looking boys for those who also liked women.
HOMOSEXUAL CUSTOMS RETURN TO KANDAHAR, 2001
“I was beautiful. I never left home for a year and a half – I was that afraid," says Farid...when an Afghan commander took a liking to him.
Hey, I'm gunna steal that one: no, I wasn't a sad, sickly little 'fraidy cat -- I was too damn beautiful to live!
Look on the bright side, Farid - at least you were safe from covid.
In the space of three sentences we're told that Kandahar's Greek love culture is one of rampant boy rape, and that the boys openly flaunt their relationships with men. Funny boys. Hope they never teased Farid.
SPECIAL FRIENDSHIPS: THE WESTERN AS PLAYGROUND (GIRLS KEEP OUT!)
Sam Hall, 21 January 2022
SHANE (1953): A Boy-love Masterpiece
Steven Freeman’s superb Special Friendships is, to my thinking, far too dismissive of the 1953 Western Shane. He says the film “deserves only an honorary mention here, because the intense bond is absent.”
This is just plain wrong. Sure, the film depicts no gabby, elbow-in-the-ribs friendship between man and boy, but the bond gains unusual strength and depth by dispensing with the usual nervous need to dissipate male passion in guffaws and arm-punches.
Freeman goes on to say, “Shane’s writers could never have guessed that this sub-strand would resonate deeper in the audience mind than the coy will they?/won’t they? flirtation with Joey’s mother...”
Sub-strand? From first scene to last, ten-year-old Joey is head-over-heels in love with Shane who fully, if quietly and a little melancholically, returns his affection. All the surrounding plotlines gain their coherence and symbolic power from this central man-boy pillar.
Brandon deWilde, blonde hair and blue eyes, is a striking presence as Joey. One moment he’s a dreamy, gap-toothed baby-Marlon Brando, the next a stolid little nugget of unwashed iron-ore. To the lone drifter Shane, Joey becomes a stumbling block, a driven claim-stake that halts his drifting and places his manhood firmly on the map. Joey, dressed like a tumbleweed and moving outdoors with the determination of a ploughshare, has an unguarded innocence evident even during his cool calculating appraisals of the masculine status-contests that rage around him.
Read more: LTTE Western as Playground
Write comment (0 Comments)
SPECIAL FRIENDSHIPS: KID SIDEKICKS DO HAVE THEIR USES
Last Action Hero met the fate it deserved. It was a stinker. Criminally so, because it was a fine idea with a perfectly cast boy but a totally botched script and non-existent direction. The movie within the movie needed to be neat and simple, allowing a realisation of the comic potential of magic boy invading and, as unintending Lord of Misrule, upending a clean and neatly scripted action world. Instead the movie within the movie was a parodic hodgepodge unto itself, one moment playing it for cheap laughs, the next trying to get us to invest. Hopeless. There was no discernible story or character arcs at work. Throwaway jokes were tossed in only to remain limply on screen as half-baked plot points. Something went seriously wrong in the making of this dud.
I suspect the problems may well have flowed from the central irreducible problem: Arnie. The big lunk can play it for laughs, sure--made a couple of fun ones with Danny DeVito--but only as a lunk. This movie called for some subtle and sophisticated comic acting from the lead. Think Bill Murray, or even, at a pinch, Tom Hanks. Actually, I'd love to have seen Clint Eastwood have a crack at this role. He had a naturally subversive undercurrent of humour in even his most gung-ho moments. At least then young Danny's adoration wouldn't have been left stranded like a tin trophy on Arnie's lacquered mantelpiece shoulders.
And, for crying out loud, you can't expect a boy actor--even one as enthusiastic and winning as Austin O'Brien--to carry a man-boy duo. The friendship remained as flat and dull as Arnie's gubernatorial career. The tragedy of all this was highlighted by the final scene of parting between Arnie and Danny. Danny saves his wounded hero by carrying him across the threshold of the movie screen, back to the safety of his celluloid home. In tears, the boy tells Arnie he can't bear to leave him, wants to stay right there with him. Arnie delivers his one convincing line when he softly but robotically says, "But I'm imaginary."
Could have built a movie round that.
* * *
ANON Thursday, 08 July 2021
Was a physical copy of this book ever published?
Editor 09 July 2021
No, sadly not. Publication was intended and was discussed by the author with his friends, but never quite happened. Besides its intrinsic value, the posting of it here is an attempt to fulfill his wishes.
Write comment (0 Comments)
PEDERASTY ISN’T GREEK TO POST-TALIBAN AFGHANS, 2002
Edmund Marlowe, 14 January 2022
Truly the modern Afghans and ancient Greeks are cultural kin in important respects. This article ought to be food for thought for the millions fond of using the almost meaningless term "western", especially English-speaking peoples who use it to foster a myth that they belong to an “us” that includes the Greeks, versus a “them”, in which Near Eastern and Central Asian peoples are often seen as the prime opponent. Most startlingly, we see here the Afghans attached (probably without interruption since before Alexander founded their second city) to a socio-cultural practice accorded great importance by the Greeks and reviled more than anything under the sun by the whole anglosphere. That of course has much broader implications concerning beliefs about the social roles of sex and of men and boys. But it is not only that. Behold the Afghan and Greek boys in these images. They look similar, faces, haircuts and (colour aside) dress (which of course has broader cultural implications). Certainly, they look more like each other than most anglo boys.
I only say “almost” meaningless, because I have to concede that belief in the myth of being “western”, despite its inherent self-contradictions, has generated for now a certain pernicious reality we would be better off without.
The "west" is a very woolly term, but can't it usefully refer to societies who have self-consciously aligned themselves with the combined Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions?
Surely it's meaningful to talk about a "western" canon of art and literature. Harold Bloom read every damn word ever written on planet earth, and he certainly found the concept useful.
In the sixties there was, briefly, a genuine and exciting desire to open the "west" up to the "east", particularly in matters spiritual, ie Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism etc. It referred to something meaningful, and one of the great tragedies of our time is that the movement foundered while politics swallowed all.
The Greeks, the Romans, the French, the British, the Americans -- they've all had a shot at being the engine room of the "west", this amorphous rough beast, this "myth". The now-widespread violent hatred of pederasty you rightly attribute to the Anglosphere is a product of the British-American dominance of the "west" and the world over the past two centuries. That puritanical homophobia is, I would say, a very western cultural product. One can trace its origins all the way back to Plato.
Still, perhaps it's impolite to talk of the dead like this.
Edmund Marlowe, 16 January 2022
You make a good point about Plato, but it’s also very revealing. I think it is rather typical of believers in the “west” to have Greek philosophy and, above all, Plato in mind when they think of themselves up as cultural heirs of the Greeks. And yet Plato was an oddball in no way representative of ancient Greece, not least because of his peculiar and unhellenic hostility to sex. There was a great deal more to being Greek than the writings of some Athenian philosophers. Shouldn’t we also remember that for several centuries after the fall of Rome, it was Arabic scholars who were preserving and absorbing Greek writings of every description, centuries when the English were totally illiterate apart from the odd priest and (so far as is known) not a single man in England could read Greek?
If only your definition of the “west” as societies combining “Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions” held up in practice, I would have to admit it had validity as a term (while still lamenting its overuse), but it simply doesn’t. To give one stark example, how can Russians be logically excluded from a west thus defined, as they invariably are? Compared with, say, the English, they are much more Greek (their script was a huge gateway to a flood of Greek ideas), much more Roman (they practise Roman law, by far the most important legacy of Rome) and more Christian too.
The real reason the Anglosphere excludes the Russians from their idea of the west is also very revealing: it is purely political and thus has nothing to do with your proposed definition. It has suited the United States and its principal political cronies very well to popularise a term that makes a supposed cultural "us" of their alliance, and a "them" of its opponents. It is therefore a propagandist lie. With the anglosphere responsible, as you say, for the violent hatred of pederasty over the past two centuries, I contend it is also a malign one.
* * *
"There is a boy across the river with a rectum like peach, but alas I cannot swim."
Nice quote -- sums up the work of gay historians and social commentators perfectly.
RINGS, SUBCULTURES AND THE UNDERGROUND BY PARKER ROSSMAN
Eccepuer, 14 January 2022
Thanks for posting the Bobby Pell cover of TRIM Feb. 1962. That issue was, indeed, my own introduction to gay digest purchases. I was 16 years old, on one of my many truancy days spent in NYC, when I spotted it hanging on the inside wall of a sidewalk newsstand. I think my heart stopped. I badly wanted to buy it, but it took 15-20 minutes of walking fretfully about until I worked up the courage to hand over my money. Many such purchases followed over the years, including other issues featuring Bobby Pell, but none have remained as memorable to this day.
If I saw that Bobby Pell cover on a newsstand today, it's not my heart I'd be concerned about but my sanity.
Write comment (0 Comments)Page 1 of 7