Plutarch tells us Demokles the Beautiful “jumped into the boiling water, thus destroying himself” and so escaped the lecherous Demetrios.
Are we supposed to believe this actually happened? Would a reader in Plutarch’s day have believed it literally, or would he have taken it as a figure of speech sort of deal?
ESSAYS IN IDLENESS BY KENKŌ, 1330-2
P. Hill 21 December 2021
Seven hundred years later and we still haven’t found the damn box!
(The second anecdote needs some work.)
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THE EARL MOUNTBATTEN OF BURMA 1900-79
ANON 76 16 December 2021
"Barbara Harris often spoke of her knowledge of the kinky antics of L.L. with the boys dressed as girls. She was loyal to him but hated the brandy and lemonade used by L.L. on the boys during sex sessions. She also couldn't understand why L.L. didn't have sex with adult males if that was his kink." This passage explains well why the new model of "homosexuality" cannot be applied to pederastic relationships.
P. Hill 17 December 2021
Knew a chap who had a kink for late Victorian Samuri Satsuma vases. Dunno why he didn’t just get a bucket.
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Sam Hall 17 December 2021
Village reports a source saying that “he had heard disturbing rumours about Mountbatten sexual activities before he was killed.”
So can we infer that Lord Louie straightened up his act after death? I think we can infer any old thing we like from all this. Most of it has the suspiciously bland, safe, sugar-hit consistency of modern processed junk news. These sorts of heartily dispensed buckets of tabloid burley – sure, they stir up a fine feeding frenzy, but only to leave the banqueters feeling rather queasy and unsatisfied and looking round with hollow-eyed hunger for the next nothing burger.
After his meticulously murky account, Norman Nield tells us, “But in retrospect I assess L.L. in a very different way today. Now I only have disgust for him.”
Which must surely prompt in us a newfound respect for this fading outposter’s relevance and virtue. Bit hard to square with his apparent unconcern at the time, not to mention the following forty-odd years, but, like murder, virtue will out.
Finding the truth here is a bit like trying to locate land in a JM Turner painting.
Edmund Marlowe, 17 December 2021
I should imagine a generous cheque from the magazine Truth helped Mr. Nield's virtue to assert itself.
I would be fascinated to read anyone else’s thoughts on which, if any, of these claims are likely to be true.
Having thought about it, my guess (and one can only guess) is that the vague claims of Decies, Chetcuti and Daly that Mountbatten liked boys are probably true, while the various claims made by Irish republicans concerning Kincora Boys’ Home are pure fabrication. They sound propagandist and mendacious and Mountbatten was anyway a very old man by then.
I would guess the claims by Norman Nield are in between – an intentional tabloid distortion of something more ordinary. We know that in most or all big cities everywhere more than forty years ago there were boys on the game, mostly teenage boys looking for excitement and pocket money, but including a few slightly younger boys, and we know that a huge proportion of men in Mountbatten’s day sometimes availed themselves of prostitution of one kind or another for fun and relief. So, if Mountbatten liked boys, it would be unsurprising that at times when he could not find more romantic alternatives, he resorted to boys who were offering themselves for rent. The Horse and Groom in Southampton was particularly known as a rendez-vous for homosexuals (a fact carefully omitted by the ironically named Truth magazine), so presumably such boys hung out around there. As a distinguished admiral, Mountbatten could hardly go there himself – he might be recognised by one of his sailors - so he got Barbara Harris to make his assignations for him. Most early teen boys appreciate being offered alcohol, so Mountbatten as their host offered it. As for dressing up as girls, if it sometimes happened, it was just erotic fun, enabling the boys to flaunt their sexiness in a culturally familiar manner.
We have claims ranging from Mountbatten’s preference for 8yo boys dressed as baby girls through to his renowned preference for handsome young men in military uniform. Which might suggest he was simply prepared to meet an individual boy on his own terms and preferences. It’s hard to get an unobstructed view with that tureen of brandy and lemonade always hoving into view.
It’s also interesting how, to create an appropriately depraved atmosphere, there’s a reliance on Mountbatten’s purported populous romping with female prostitutes. With the boys all we get is one glimpse of a half-naked lad sitting on his lap. It's hell, Jim, but not as we know it.
The tabloid approach used here is exactly the same one used on gay men in the fifties. Or, for that matter, used on boys who masturbated over the preceding century or two. Paint a picture of a diseased shadowy underworld where sad sickos pursue their deviant compulsions. As the emergence into humdrum boringness of today’s gay community shows, it’s a luridly exaggerated description of a necessarily secretive milieu wholly created by salivating bigots.
Given the chance to bring on his favourites at court, in the more usual civilized fashion, with all the attendant advantages that accrue to such boys, who knows what positive Greek love heights Lord Louie might have achieved. One relevant and rock solid fact: Princes Philip and Charles had the opportunity to enjoy a close boyhood relationship with Mountbatten, and couldn’t speak highly enough of his character.
NORMAN DOUGLAS: A BIOGRAPHY BY MARK HOLLOWAY
Sam Hall 13 December 2021
Mark Holloway does himself great credit with this balanced portrait of an extraordinary man. But it’s interesting how he prefaces his portrait of Norman Douglas as an honorable lover of boys, with a lifelong positive influence on the lives of his loved boys, with the remark:
“One can wish, as the present writer would have wished, to keep his young sons from too great an intimacy with Douglas…”
I think Holloway is speaking honestly, without undue phobia, and it speaks to the very deep and complex and intractable problems modernity has with pederasty. For it was in Douglas's Greek love relationships of greatest intimacy where he was, as he himself said, at his creative best.
Holloway freely, almost enthusiastically, endorses Douglas’s relationship with Eric Wolton. It’s a wonderfully deft piece of psychological evaluation, where Holloway sifts the boy’s diaries to show how Douglas’s loving mentorship was inspiriting the lad’s boyish prattle, guiding and encouraging his maturation.
Perhaps Douglas was onto this modern problem in his magnificent extended essay How About Europe, where he observed, apropos England’s over-regulated society (published in 1930, mind!):
“Mr. Clive Bell, speaking of this frenzy for legislation, observes that an ordinary Englishman is, on the whole, less free than a Roman slave in the time of Hadrian. He attributes this state of affairs largely to the activities of elderly and embittered virgins; nor should I be surprised to learn that there is a correlation between sexlessness and repressive legislation, and that many of the discomforts of life in England are due to eunuchs of one kind or another.”
Lo the locked-down West. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos: the Kingdom of the Eunuchs is come.
Edmund Marlowe, 14 December 2021
Very interesting. What do you suppose were the reasons why Holloway "would have wished to keep his young sons from too great an intimacy with Douglas." What exactly did he fear would have been the adverse consequences?
A father in the last forty years, however much he realised the good a man like Douglas would be likely to do his sons through intimacy, would have a legitimate fear in the trauma and other harm that the state would inflict on them for their own supposed good if a sexual liaison were to come to its attention, but that was hardly the case when Holloway was writing, less still in Douglas's time, was it?
Sam Hall 15 December 2021
I would take his comment as referring to his own time of the mid 70’s. Partly his comment could be pre-emptive self-defence: although clearly wrong, would you look at this! But more I think it points to the deeper level of “wrongness” that homosexuality, after centuries of demonisation, has come to occupy. The FACT that Douglas’s Greek love affairs were wholly positive in a way traceable in history does not reach down to the foundational original-sin level of homosexuality. I think Holloway betrays a Christian fear that Douglas’s undeniably fine house of pederasty is built upon shifty sand.
The 60’s began a process of tinkering with and renovating this foundational fact of life, but never altered its essence. As sex emerged into the sunlit uplands of secularity, a need for revamped foundations grew. All this fizzy, newly discovered goodness of sex needed a hellish antithesis to rest on. The final sculpting of homosex, into good androphile and evil pederastic, was a creation worthy of Michelangelo: behold the secular egalitarian masterpiece and its final crushing defeat of all that is evil in man. The public square now celebrates a new monumental beheading of Goliath, not by divine David but by a busy brotherhood of bureaucrats. Mere boyish happiness and fulfilment was never gunna so much as stub a toe on that lot.
Edmund Marlowe, 15 December 2021
I find that pretty convincing as a psychological interpretation of why, deep down, he would not have wanted his sons to be very intimate with Douglas. But how do you think he would have rationalised it to himself or a trusted friend? Supposing a friend whom he trusted not to publish his answer, who had read his book and made clear his admiration for Douglas, had asked him in confidence, "But Mark, given what you know about the wonderful effect Douglas had on the boys he had affairs with, why wouldn't you have welcomed your son being one of them?" How do you think he would have replied?
Sam Hall 16 December 2021
The “Holloway” I’m postulating would have rationalised it simply and easily—without thinking, as it were. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind, records a bunch of fascinating clinical experiments, showing the mind’s inbuilt facility for using the fig-leaf of rationality to cover deeper emotional promptings, a process not accessible to the conscious mind. Holloway would have told himself, and his friend, that the risks—possible gayness, emotional damage, social stigma, etc—outweigh the potential benefits; that Douglas was providing care more fitly provided by a loving mother and father. Pressed far enough, he’d simply maintain that it just wasn’t right.
However, our “Holloway” could, in the right circumstances, employ the dextrous mind in the opposite direction—if, rather than assessing an abstract proposal, he's dealing with real life. Say he had a son, 12-14yo, who had shown a marked life-improvement—mood, academic achievement—under the influence of a new friend he’d made, a rather enigmatic local chap with a hat and a cane. Holloway quite likely would cautiously and watchfully approve the friendship and leave any further speculations lying quietly in an un-trafficked corner of the mind. The instinctual promptings of what’s-best-for-my-child leading the dissonant way.
Of course, as you’ve pointed out, that was possible then, all but impossible now. Parents have in recent times been roundly pilloried for such an approach. Survival of the most-phobic is today’s Darwinian imperative.
Edmund Marlowe 16 December 2021
I agree entirely with your last two paragraphs, and I would agree with the first if it was said with reference to most fathers in Holloway's time. But if it had been, I wouldn't have thought it interesting to pose the question. Holloway wasn't most fathers. He was a perceptive thinker who immersed himself in knowledge of the lives of Douglas and his boys. If Holloway answered the friend I postulated with mention of the possible risks of "possible gayness, emotional damage, social stigma", the friend would answer:
"But you know better than anyone that not one of the many boys loved by Douglas is known to have turned out gay. On the contrary, you know that all those whose later lives you have documented thoroughly (Eric, René and Emilio) were definitely heterosexual. Equally, you found no signs of emotional damage or stigma. René died rather young, but your portraits of the other two show them in middle age well-adjusted and proud of their places in Douglas's life. You may be right 'that Douglas was providing care more fitly provided by a loving mother and father', but what if the parents weren't providing it? Emilio's were dead and Ettore's father was a prisoner of war."
Something is missing here, and I think it deserves nailing.
Sam Hall 17 December 2021
Once the friend asks “what if the parents weren’t providing it?” – isn’t he conceding Holloway’s original statement as valid? Holloway’s wish that no sons of his become intimate with Douglas is synonymous with his wish that his sons enjoy the best possible parenting—and if he’s not wishing that, he’s not the good man we’re purporting him to be.
Is the “something missing” the modern belief that good parents not only remove any need for a pederast in a boy’s life, but renders him a negative influence? I would, though, still tend to see that as a rationalisation of the deeper cultural taboo.
Or are you thinking of something altogether different?
Yes, I think you’ve got much closer to the mark now. The friend could be conceding that. Moreover, Holloway could well answer him by himself conceding that having Douglas in their lives could be wonderful for boys who were not getting the care they needed from their parents, and reminding his friend that all he had said was that he himself would have wished to keep his own sons from too great an intimacy with the great man. There would be nothing dishonest or hypocritical about this if Holloway believed he was indeed an excellent father.
However, closely related to this is a strong feeling Holloway may very well have instinctively imagined having that, if he was aware of it, he would probably have hoped not to have to explain because it sounds more discreditable than it really is, namely jealousy. I suspect the French writer Gabriel Matzneff, a highly experienced lover of boys and girls, is right in saying parents are almost always implacably opposed to their pubescent children having adult lovers because they don’t want to share their affections.
I say this is not really discreditable because I think this jealousy could only not be felt by a monstrous father, one who did not care about having his sons’ love. For a powerful and realistic depiction of the emotions involved, I would strongly recommend seeing the superlatively well-acted BBC drama, The Lost Boys (1978), about the relationship between J.M. Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies boys. There is a heart-breaking scene in which the dying father (unquestionably a loving one and a thoroughly decent man) comes briefly home from hospital: he is briefly greeted by his sons, but then their special adult friend Barrie appears on the scene and they rush off excitedly to be with him instead. At one point, the father confesses to the only one of his five sons who is not taken with Barrie: “no father likes to share his children with another man.” Though he goes on to say that he has learned to accept Barrie because he is convinced he is a good thing. I suspect most fathers would not be so noble, and many more would not like the situation to arise. It is of minor importance that Barrie did not have sex with these boys, while Douglas did have it with his. What matters is that both had the attribute of easily winning boys’ hearts through giving their own to them, as well as being splendid characters.
I would also suggest merely as a possibility an additional explanation, that Holloway was being a little disingenuous. In recent years, anyone who wrote such a fair-minded account as he did of a pederast like Douglas would be accused of condoning “pedophilia”, and probably worse. While the reaction in 1976 would not have been so venomous, Holloway may still have feared it enough to wish to protect himself with the statement under discussionas an appeasement. It also served to point out gently to the reader his own heterosexual credentials as a father.
A REVIEW OF THE FILM GUTER JUNGE (2008)
Sam Hall 6 December 2021
Was Sven’s incident with the ten-year-old an incongruity or the end result of the physical and mental pummeling he’d endured – mainly at the hands of a father who’d shown no interest in his son until charged with the mission of extirpating his sexuality and capacity to love. The fact that the father is not a bad man, develops a genuine concern for his son, is only evidence of this film’s determination to leave no screw unturned.
In such a grim film, the brief, albeit quickly-snuffed, relationship between Sven and Patrick is the most shocking incongruity – a genuine moment of brightness amid the relentless gloom. But Patrick’s winning, infectious smile cannot, in this world, catch on, and is duly cured.
Sven was an averagely mixed up seventeen-year-old youth, fatherless and a bit adrift. His penchant for shaving his body hair showed his trepidation at approaching manhood. To have taken on a senior role in a romantic relationship with the rather love-struck Patrick seemed set to offer both boys a fair helping of what they clearly needed.
So it was incredibly sad, late in the film, to see Sven’s disturbed attempt to recreate the bright Patrick-moment with an unknown, uncomprehending child. By hook or by crook we Frankensteinian brutes will create the monsters we so inexplicably crave.
It’s notable how repulsive the adult world is in this film. Disengaged for the most part, they hover oppressively and voyeuristically over Sven’s life, chortling over his masturbation and bathroom habits. All good fun, apparently, as long as the young man remains safely tucked away in his claustrophobic little room. Call us when you’ve met a nice girl.
These “grown-ups” are nothing but a bunch of insecure, past-it, hook-up loafers, still boozily trying to recapture the romantic thrills which properly belong to youth. Not only do they refuse to grow up, they sure as hell aren’t going to let any young whelps get the jump on them.
The final scene is the perfect apotheosis of despair this film courts from the start. A maximum security lockdown, father staring blankly into dead air, Sven lost, dislocated, his physical location no longer traceable or relevant. The memory of him, already fading, is superimposed on our collective gargantuan life-sentence of cold state security – a fitting endpoint and inevitable destination of today’s whole damn shooting match.
Write comment (0 Comments)A REVIEW OF THE FILM LES AMITIÉS PARTICULIÈRES (1964)
The older boy was, in a way that is pitiful for the genre, emasculated in the development of the story. His manners and reserve cannot be faulted in their time and place, but the lack of a silently smoldering anger at the final circumstance of the world's betrayal was an affront to the dignity of his sex, in a film which supposedly meant to defend it.
THE TALE OF THE WAZĪR NŪR AL-DĪN, HIS BROTHER THE WAZĪR SHAMS AL- DĪN AND HASAN BADR AL- DĪN
ANON Thursday, 21 October 2021
What is the conflict and resolution of this Tale?
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ON THE ROLE OF THE FIGHTING COCK IN GREEK PEDERASTY
ANON Friday, 15 October 2021
Is the relationship between Ares and Alectryon homosexual?
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Editor Friday, 15 October 2021
I think that is ambiguous. In the second paragraph, Lucian is quoted as saying Alectryon was "beloved" of Ares, but the Greek word thus translated was φίλος, which is not necessarily sexual, though the fact that he was an adolescent close to the god is probably a hint in that direction.
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Hombre Wednesday, 16 December 2020
Hello. I have looked this up but could not find any clear information, so maybe you could help me: as it was published by "a Schoolmaster," I was wondering how do we know that Arnold Smith is the writer of A Boy's Absence. Any hint would be appreciated. Thank you.
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Editor Wednesday, 16 December 2020
I am afraid I don't know. My authority for this was Timothy d'Arch Smith's Love in Earnest (1970), which I believed because it is exceptionally well-researched and reliable. He says:
"The Uranian group held one further schoolmaster, Arnold W. Smith, headmaster of Battersea Polytechnic Secondary School. In 1919 he had published anonymously a long, moving poem, A Boy’s Absence, with the firm of Allen & Unwin. It is the lament of a neurotic, insomniac schoolmaster at the end of term for a boy whom he will not see again until the autumn. The poem—much admired by Montague Summers—embodies the highest ideals and a praiseworthy self-criticism. In 1926, Smith published a second book, The Isle of Mistorak and Other Poems, this time allowing his initials to appear on the title-page." [He then quotes from this book at length].
I don't know d'Arch Smith's source, but it could be the following given in a footnote as the source for Summers' admiration: "his unpublished autobiography, The Galanty Show, MS. Leslie C. Staples, London."
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ANON Friday, 15 October 2021
Perhaps the following poets/books may be added to the poetry page:
Constantine Cavafy: The Complete Poems of Cavafy: Expanded Edition, trans. by Rae Dalven, Harcourt Brace, 1976
Kurt Neuburger: Knabennicht minder - Gedichte, VerlagGruppe Vis-à-Vis, Berlin 1988
Sandro Penna: Remember Me, God of Love: Selected Poems and Prose, translated by Blake Robinson, Carcanet Press, 1993
Sandro Penna: This Strange Joy: Selected Poems of Sandro Penna, translated by W.S. Di Piero, Ohio State Univ. Press, 1982
Stefan George: The Works of Stefan George, 2nd Edition, Olga Marx and Ernst Morwitz, UNC Press, 2020
Staton of Sardis: Das Hohelied der Knabenliebe: ErotischeGedichteaus der GriechischenAnthologie, translated into German by Wolfram Setz; Verlag Rosa Winkel,1987
Straton of Sardis: La Muse Garçonnièreet Les Amours, trans. by Roger Peyrefitte, Flammarion, 1973
Straton of Sardis: Eros gai: AntologiaPalatina, llibre XII, translated into Catalan by Jaume Juan Castelló, AdesiaraEditoria, 2018
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SEXUAL ACTIVITY WITH THE MOUTH BY EDWARD BRONGERSMA
ANON Wednesday, 22 September 2021
The putative healthful properties of semen may not be entirely apocryphal. Prostaglandins constitute a family of natural chemical substances involved in a host of physiologic processes including inflammation, renal circulatory heath, gastric mucosal protection and cardiovascular homeostasis. As the name suggests, this class of compounds was initially identified in prostatic secretions. Bull semen, for example, was a traditional Chinese remedy for treatment of peptic ulcer.
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