"Boylove": A Clarification

Actually I'm not sure I can clarify this, because I'm not entirely sure what the word means in the first place. There are however two quite distinct possibilities.

The first (and, I'm sorry to say, the most likely) is that 'boylove' is a straightforward euphemism for 'pederasty'. 'Pederasty' is defined, at least by my dictionary, as the act of anal intercourse between a man and a boy. In other words 'boylove' is just a nice word for "going-all-the-way" gay sex with boys. The English word 'pederasty' comes from the Greek word paiderastia, meaning literally just that. Pais is 'boy' - in Athens the passive eromenos - and the erastes was the older male gay lover. And no, I have very little time for those who want to redefine 'boy' as meaning 'adolescent male' or even 'young man' (as indeed puer means in Latin). You only have to look at the Athenians' own depictions of classical pederasty to know that however old these lads may have been chronologically (e.g. possibly as old as fourteen) they still had prepubescent bodies, with no hair on their undeveloped 'nads, and no doubt they had lovely singing voices as well.

This pederastic "love" was specifically "sexual". It was eros. But there is of course the second, slightly more humane meaning of 'boylove', which would be something along the lines of 'love for boys, not necessarily sexual in nature'. Personally I would add to that what is to me quite an obvious rider, which is that since love precludes sexual abuse then true love of boys cannot be sexual - or at least not deliberately. (And I mean to come back to that last point later.) For the truth is that for the Ancient Greeks there were at least four different sorts of love. Everyone is familiar with "sexual" love, and everyone has heard of "Platonic" love (which for some reason always puts me in mind of old queens and fag hags). But when it came to love in the ancient world there was far more to it even than this.

To my mind the best modern work on love, or at any rate the most user friendly, is C S Lewis's little book The Four Loves. It is short and (of course!) highly readable. It is not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination. But Lewis does himself great credit not just by successfully identifying that there are four "loves", but also in being able to say what they are. He falls down though in three important ways.

The four loves, to use Lewis's (Greek) terminology, are sexual love (eros), affection (storge), friendship (philia) and charity (agape). So far so good! Lewis's first problem though is that he doesn't seem to realise that all four are in fact merely expressions of the same phenomenon. (I got into trouble with the Dancing King earlier this evening - or yesterday evening, even - for writing that it doesn't matter so much in what way love is expressed - which ended up almost looking as if I was endorsing saucy shenanigans providing that they're done "for love", which was precisely the opposite of what I meant.) His second failing, interestingly, is that he doesn't put them in any particular order: he doesn't distinguish between the higher and the lower loves, and more importantly he doesn't realise that there is a spectrum between fullness (i.e. with eros at one end) and purity (i.e. with agape at the other). Most irritatingly of all, his definitions of the four loves, and a lot of the examples he gives, are hopelessly wide of the mark.

Well, Lewis started writing an essay about love and ended writing a book. And obviously love is a subject that has kept religion, literature, art and (obviously) music going since the Dawn of Man. But to give some very brief examples...

The "school" of love, by which I mean the environment in which man learns to love (and if he doesn't learn it there then he may never learn it) is the family. The first love a boy learns is brotherly love, which is the love of friendship. It is the simplest and purest sort of love he can learn. Slightly more complicated is the love he then learns for his parents, which is the love of affection. And finally, when he reaches full maturity, he will learn the love of marriage. (Once again, I'd make the point that he should. Clearly though, many men never do.) Here then we have fraternal love, filial and/or parental love, and finally marital love. This is important to bear in mind because once these loves are established in their proper, family contexts then the true meaning of a man's love for a boy (and, if it is true love, vice versa) ought to become clear. This love is the love of a parent for its offspring. It is the love of the child for its mother and father. (It is "storgic".) It is not the love of husband and wife for one another. (It is not erotic.)

Obviously I'm going to have to come back to this, because so far it can't have made a great deal of sense. But I would finally (for tonight) point out one important point about the Greek word storge ('affection'), which is that it doesn't just mean affection of parents for children (which is essentially the same as the affection that children themselves have for small furry animals). It can also have a "sexual" meaning, and the close connexion between affection and sexuality is amply borne out both in literature and through a bit of basic amateur pop psychology. That does not, however, mean that the two sorts of love are the same, because they are not.

But more of this some other time!