Stuart wrote: "A circumscribed sexuality inevitably exaggerates erotic fantasy, channels energy into extraordinarily trivial obsessions, and produces all manner of hyper-sensitivity."
It reads like one of Kipling's "Just So" stories -- "How The Gay Got Its Rainbow".
SPECIAL FRIENDSHIPS: AN AWFULLY HONEST FILM
One of the many enjoyable aspects of Freeman's book is that one can swing so effortlessly from whole-hearted agreement to fierce opposition -- without ever endangering the good humour and enlightenment he offers. I was startled, for instance, earlier on when he mentioned in passing he loathed the term "male-bonding". Now I admit the term has a tendency to be bandied about by those embarrassing bear-hugging types, but the term itself I'd always thought blameless and benign.
But his views here on "The Lost Boys" are bang on the money, I reckon. An extraordinary production that managed to illuminate the enigma that was J.M. Barrie and his boys, without ever man-handling it into some gross Hollywood trope or other.
Freeman says Barrie had a "wistful veneration of boyhood", and was "completely in thrall to a romantic view of boyhood". I think that's a fair description of Barrie's emotional core, but it's equally significant that Barrie was quite sarcastically scathing of his own boy-infatuation. In fact this was the quality that fired the sharp, often dark wit which his boys found so attractive. Un-riddle me that!
Barrie certainly didn't romanticise his eccentric, somewhat marooned existence in Neverland. The paradox of his boy-love, an unarguably sexual phenomenon, being deeply and fundamentally celibate--well, that's a mystery beyond anyone's ken, even the subject's biggest thinkers such as Plato. But Barrie accepted it, and lived it with admirable courage, dignity, honour--and the all-important humour. A boysexual of any era, fraught or free, can't aspire to much better.
The depth and breadth of this book review make Carminha's novel as fascinating and compelling as could possibly be; it almost wouldn't matter if the novel were a fiction of Mr. Hall's imagination. He gives us so much to react to here, but I feel I should wait until I've read the book to do so myself. Efforts such as Hall's deserve serious attention.
This website is getting richer every day, it seems. Bravo.
So boy-love, practiced right, is all about the man’s quest for greatness—is that it? In pursuing the lofty goal of virtuous immortality, the wise man is expected to transcend the earth-bound love of an individual boy. The too-cute-by-half Diotima says,
...the correct order of going...is to begin with the particular examples of beauty, but always to mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using them as steps only, from one going on to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies...until...he arrives at the study of nothing but beauty itself...
It certainly worked a treat for Socrates. His cold refusal of Alkibiades’ favours got him a canon-ful of “the glorious fame of immortal virtue”. The rebuffed boy, however, felt “dishonoured” by his mentor’s “contemptuous and derisive and disdainful” attitude towards his “youthful beauty.”
Alkibiades was driven to his “wit’s end” by the man he was besotted with but couldn’t snag. With wine loosening his tongue, Alkibiades remembers how he found himself, as Athens’ most beautiful boy, taking on the lover’s role, trying to seduce the ironically aloof old goat. Healthy or humiliating? Difficult to read it as something done for Alkibiades’ benefit. It seems far more about Socrates’ quest for godhead.
Moving into manhood, Alkibiades becomes an erratic wrecker, a self-indulgent party-boy and dedicated womaniser, completely uninterested in the honourable Greek love tradition of pederastic mentorship. Perhaps unsurprising given his experience with the one man he fell seriously in love with.
Alkibiades concludes by saying:
I am not the only person he has treated thus: there are Charmides, son of Glaukon, Euthydemos, son of Diokles, and any number of others whom he has deceived into thinking of him as the lover, while bringing it about that he is the beloved rather than the lover.
Always the beloved, so always positioned to be the receiver of gifts and attention. Irony can only exculpate so far. I think Alkibiades’ accusations deserve to be taken seriously. Believing the victim, I think it’s called. It has to be asked: Was Socrates a dirty old man? Were the charges brought against him at the end, of corrupting Athens’ youth, justified?
More bumble-bee than gadfly, Socrates was forever buzzing his way through the agora, regularly pausing to dip his prickly dialogue into every boyish bloom opening to the rosy dawn of civilisation. Tirelessly gathering up inspiration like big bags of pollen, he never stopped to risk the dread sting of physical contact, only went buzzing on and ever upward to some immortal state where this Socratic back-and-forth finally becomes One.
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SPECIAL FRIENDSHIPS: SAD AND FLEETING BEAUTY
“The attack on pederasty is at root an attack on maleness itself.”
Christianity did wage a war on the male violence in the European Dark Ages that we are all the beneficiaries of. There are gains to be made through culturally reinforced self-restraint and we undoubtedly made them. But any good trait is capable of becoming pathological. Honesty’s good. Pursued to an abstract extreme, it can be cruel and murderous. Moderating pederasty is good. Pursued to the pathological extreme Freeman describes well it becomes gangrenous. The protection of boys today is reminiscent of the way Ottoman heirs apparent were kept safe. Protected from every conceivable danger--along with quite a few inconceivable--they grew up sickly and decadent and myopically self-obsessed, not much use to anyone. Which isn't a bad description of western civilisation right now.
The film Is Anybody There? is rendered safe by Michael Caine’s old old age. He was 75 at the making of, and they worked hard to add at least ten years. Physically he’s finished and spiritually he’s half way to the cutting room floor. Good performance by Bill Milner as plucky 11yo Edward saves this soggy old bowl of tapioca from being a complete waste of bran.
There was one message worth the gleaning. A bright, curious boy lives with his mum and dad in an old folks home. He spends his time trying to find evidence of ghosts. In this ageing, dreary, senile world, maybe the afterlife, the boy thinks, can offer a cure for his terminal boredom and isolation. Hats off to the metaphor, anyway. Used to be the boy himself was the surest way to heaven—now the lad has to jerry-build his own stairway.
The corpse of Caine past has enough crusty, coughing old echoes to offer the boy some hints of a friendship, and there is an occasional murmur of warmth amidst all the catarrhs and cold custard.
(Memo to film-makers: twinkly old-geezer humor--eg the nonagenarian's dirty jokes that scandalize a young priest--is more shopworn than Caine's slippers.)
But the moment the boy makes a big gesture, makes a sterling effort to bring light into the old codger’s life, with an important trip to a graveyard (where else?)--the old codger starts weeping about old regrets and suddenly looks at Edward and says balefully, “Who are you?” In the graveyard of Western culture, a boy has to know his place – which is roughly nowhere. Caine dies shortly afterwards. And the boy’s sad but wiser, apparently. Is anybody there, indeed.
5. A Different Drummer Boy / Leonard Taft
Man the adventurer, the brute, the hero, the conqueror—and ever the reliable dupe of any bit of skirt or likely lad passing by. There’s gotta be something in that more than philosophical, if nature would cough it up.
Woman uses sex as siren, luring the full-masted ship of man to his domestic ruin. But the boy, he wields sex like a grappling hook, he will board that ship of man and monkey all the rigging before the captain knows which end of his mast is up.
NOTES OF A JOURNEY IN TURKISTAN, 1873
Ned Hedley 6 January 2022
“These batchas are as much respected as the greatest singers and artistes are with us. Every movement they make is followed and applauded, and I have never seen such breathless interest as they excite, for the whole crowd seems to devour them with their eyes, while their hands beat time to every step.”
I sometimes wonder who exactly we’re protecting by carefully locking our boys away until they’re suitably blockish, agreeably hefty and hirsute. As adults we spend billions each year on trying to look and act young—mainly women, but men also are increasingly nipping, tucking, tautening. The result, these cackling hyenas of the henna rinses, these straining try-hards of the depilated hides and stapled chins—would they last ten seconds in a public square that allowed a single batcha freedom of expression?
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A GIFT FROM SANTA BY JOHN REMINGTON
An interesting and very enjoyable story. What started out as a fun lark slowly developed and matured and became more serious. Like Peter Pan, though, I couldn't help but feel a little sceptical about this growing up business.
Santa spoke a lot of sense—sex and literature are joined at the nib—but I’m not sure about this one: “while an artist need not pursue an exclusively homosexual lifestyle to be effective, any repression of the homosexual component could seriously cripple his creative impulse.”
The link between homosexuality and art is undeniable, but the relationship is as hard to pin down as an Emerson essay. No culture has worked harder to repress homosexuality than the West, and it hasn’t prevented an impressive artistic legacy. In our day we’ve seen a great big friendly welcome-mat put out for the androphile homosexual. It has certainly not provoked an efflorescence of artistic genius. Pete Buttigiegs by the score but no Donatellos or Leonardos.
I sometimes wonder if a distinction can be made between the boysexual and the gay, when it comes to art. The boysexual is more creatively productive when operating in a tolerant culture, such as ancient Athens; the gay man is more creatively productive when coping with rigorous repression.
The molly, grandmother to today’s gay, was forged in the severely homo-repressive London of the early eighteenth century. Art for the molly was an important tool for survival, nurtured amongst underground networks of the like-minded. Pederasty, as an age-old human and pre-human institution, produced its best when the cultural parameters were set to encourage its better angels, when it was in tune with the zeitgeist. Suppressing pederasty doesn’t create close-knit underground communities, it denatures the energetic bond, splits man from boy, dries up the wells of creativity and leaves nought but ashes behind.
So right now we have a perfect storm of sterility.
* * *
All the pics of the Vienna Boys' Choir are cool. But I couldn't help noticing -- there doesn't appear to be a single girl in any of 'em. Weird. Was this a thing?
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Sam Hall 1 January 2021
The problem with “The Tale of Ahmet” is that it’s in the wrong publication. It’s a gay fable, so rather odd that it formed the centrepiece of an inaugural boylove mag.
Kemal’s gift of sorcery is synonymous with exclusive homosexuality, something his mentor Abdallah reinforces: “Witchcraft and magic ought never to come within reach of women or girls...”
Our gay wizard is “surrounded by a selection of the most beautiful boys in all of Islam” but cannot find true love, a boy who can give him “eternal devotion”, or, as it’s more piously known today, “gay marriage”.
So once he finds Ahmet, a boy of ideal beauty, Kemal sets him upon a stereotypical gay rights of passage. Ahmet is cut off from any connection to his family, is taken in hand by a manipulative fairy who snuffs any hetero-impulses he may have had, and is then sent on a rather gruelling sexual underworld odyssey which seems inspired by 70’s gay bathhouse culture: forging an identity through promiscuous homosex.
The boy’s entire adolescent journey, his sexual awakening and development, is of no interest to Kemal. He’s happy to remain on the sidelines, completely uninvolved, waiting for his idealised finished product. Which he gets in the end: an experienced youth worthy of being admitted to the separatist cabal of gay wizards.
I was reminded of the British TV series Queer as Folk, where 15yo Nathan, confident of his gayness, was trying to work his way into the local gay community. He was met mainly with amused disdain, not taken seriously, not thought capable of being truly gay—get back to us, sonny, when you know your way round a nightclub. Even a gay teenager, it seems, would fare better with a genuine boysexual.
“The Tale of Ahmet” celebrates the modern libel aimed at boysexuals, that they desire to recruit a boy into an underground life of homosexuality. Talk about a misuse of the magic of boyhood.
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What I find interesting about stories like these is that scientists, including social scientists, are supposed to be intrigued by these kinds of anomalies. Even if they do not fundamentally disqualify a scientific theory, the scientific community often keeps lists of observed anomalies to encourage further research into the gaps in our understanding to expand, and if necessary alter conceptual frameworks. The fact that the thousands of testimonies of positive experiences like Edgar's make up scarcely a footnote in CSA ideology to me can only indicate that they are not anomalies at all and the government-funded researchers know this very well.
As long as CSA researchers are faced with one anecdote at a time, they can ignore it. And if they're ignoring it, the public will never even hear a whisper about it. The only thing that can crack this wall of silence is powerful, focused blows hitting all at once. Of course, it's dangerous. T. Rivas apparently pulled his book Positive Memories from ipce, and we all saw what Rind went through, but activism like this makes the authorities defensive and angry. Defensiveness and anger in these "experts" encourage the public's willingness to ask questions while the chilling, Nefertiti-like gaze of the academic establishment certainly does not. Keep the establishment on its toes for long enough and eventually it will lose its balance. That's when what Kuhn calls a "paradigm shift" is most likely to occur. Society has already adapted to new stimuli more than anyone ever could have predicted. I think it can do it again.
Sam Hall 1 January 2021
I tend to think our Nefertiti-like social scientists would sooner gouge out their one remaining eye than take a dispassionate look at the evidence, be it clinical, anecdotal, historical, artistic, anthropological or zoological.
Then again, your optimism is a far healthier approach.
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