"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!

The Hooded Man

Normally when I blog my blog entries almost write themselves. And so blogging about boys is easy, considering how much I think about them all the time.

At the same time, of course, it has to be said, I do start a lot of blogs which then peter out because my interest in a subject gets "blogged out". Once I've got my thoughts on a subject I'm interested in out onto the Internet I sort of "get it out of my system". And then I think of a neat title for a new blog, a new web-ID to go with it, and I'm off.

This evening I took a small trip back to my own childhood, watching the DVDs I got for Xmas (actually my own present to myself - Heh, heh, heh!) of Richard Carpenter's superb TV-version of Robin Hood from the 1980s. At this point, I am of course assuming that Americans have a vague idea who Robin Hood was, or at least what and who he was supposed to have been. (I.e. a Saxon outlaw living in the forest with a band of "merry men", robbing from the rich, e.g. especially the Norman invaders, and giving to the poor, e.g. other Saxons.) What he is, to this day, is of course the great hero and mystery figure that every boy has been at some point before he reached adolescence. He's part of our culture, he's part of our mystical and legendary inheritance, and he's part our childhood.

Carpenter, in his version, called Robin of Sherwood, did various interesting things with the legend. To my knowledge, indeed, these have all impacted to greater or lesser extent on how other filmmakers have approached the character and his story. It's now de rigueur, for example, to have an "ethnic" character in Robin Hood's band - although whereas nowadays this is in order to fulfil various politically correct ethnic quotas, in Robin of Sherwood it was actually quite unpremeditated and in fact at the time quite natural and logical (as is explained by in the commentaries on my DVDs).

Of the two most important "innovations" on Carpenter's part though, one was the element of magic. Almost as if using up various leftover MacGuffins from the King Arthur legends (including magic swords and magic arrows, with Herne the Hunter standing in for Merlin the Magician, and indeed, in a later episode, the Round Table itself), the sword and sorcery stuff gives the 1980s Robin a mystical kick that very few others can have had.

The other, conversely, is a deliberately gritty realism. No doubt this was partly a function of early budget restrictions, and partly indeed a function of fashionable modernist naturalism. But what it did, more importantly, was it grounded the magical elements of the story in what was credible and recognisable (always essential in fantasy!). At the same time it also the show a sense of historical authenticity (e.g. with a lot of filming taking place in authentic medieval buildings, not to mention, er, authentic English forests) and of contemporary relevance (e.g. especially Ray Winstone's portrayal of Will Scarlett as a sort of medieval football hooligan).

For me, most importantly of all, it wired directly into my preteen heart and soul, and in an extraordinary way it never really left. Every few years I still find the old Sherwood Forest whimsy comes upon me - and then it's off to the thirteenth century, Nottingham, the greenwood... and the Hooded Man!

Some "Alternative" Scouts

Well, there are no pics this evening, due to some "internal error" at Blogger. Apropos of Scouting (i.e. in my last post), tonight's vid is of some "alternative" Scouts. It's from the superb paedophile film Der Unhold. If you like this sort of thing, there's plenty more were it came from.

Tintin's not gay

Oh, fuck off, Parris, you odious old queen!

Matthew Parris used to go cruising on Clapham Common near where I live. For all I know he still does, though I've never actually seen him there. In any case though, it's an almost unbearably sad, lonely sort of passtime - lonely in the sense of being surrounded by lots of other desperate, dysfunctional men of all ages, wondering around in circles, never talking to each other or having meaningful human contact. But then meaning is something that Matthew Parris clearly has little familiarity with.

Like the vast majority of gays, Parris is of course a closet pedo. Yes, he'd be happier with himself (and a less unbearable person to others) if he admitted it, if only to himself. As it is, of course, he can't (because paedophilia is of course "wrong" - and so not like homosexuality at all!). What we have to put up with, therefore, are things like this in this morning's Times (Yes, them again!), in which he tries to "out" the famous Belgian children's strip-cartoon character Tintin as gay. As usual, this is what psychologists call projection: not so much "takes one to know one" as "takes one to wish the other one was one - even if he's not". In fact I vaguely wonder if Matthew Parris the hack was quietly taken with Matthew Parish the actor, who played the boy-reporter on stage in the acclaimed theatre-version at the Young Vic.

As it happens, of course, Tintin is not gay. He's just a boy. And in the very last Tintin book, Tintin and Alph-Art, he actually has a girlfriend, in the shape of one Martine Vandezande. (Personally I'd have warned him off, but what can you do?) Parris, unfortunately, who doesn't know much about Tintin or human nature (especially his own), clearly wants to tell us about all his secret sexual fantasies about Tintin. But he can't (as I said), and so he has to let "it" leak out in this sort of thing, and he dresses it up in a joke article with lots of amused irony. At least, one assumes he's joking. (Rupert Murdoch's other British daily - which is also the country's most popular straight porno mag - gives Parris a little, er, puff, which is not a far cry from their "Ten Ways to Spot a Poof"-genre of earlier years.)

The sad thing is that taken together the Tintin books make up a hugely important part of European boy-culture. Partly this is because they're the sorts of books that every boy should be allowed to read and enjoy. But partly also because of their huge moral seriousness. The best story, Tintin in Tibet, is quite explicitly a love story between a boy and younger boy (between Tintin and Chang - named after the author's real-life best friend). But it is also about love between a boy and a man (Tintin and Captain Haddock). It is this sort of love that "gays", with their Wagnerian renunciation of true love, cannot really understand.

There is something deeply revealing about the homosexual condition (or perhaps I should say the "gay-pedo-in-denial"-condition), with all its hypocrisies and neuroses, that Matthew Parris cannot cope with this sort of thing. Yes, it's sad the Parris knows nothing about the Roman Catholic Scout movement in Belgium (and later France), which really laid the imaginative "ground" that Tintin as a character grew out of. In fact he knows nothing about religion (being an atheist) and nothing about Scouting - apart from the usual gay innuendo, which they of course always hotly deny is paedophilic.

In reality the Tintin books are a wonderful and beautiful expression of the nobility of Scouting, of friendship and intelligence and hard work, and most of all of boyhood itself. Men who liked boys once understood all of these things implicitly. Matthew Parris, sad to say, will probably never understand them.

[No pics for this, yet! Apparently there's an "internal error" going on! Finally! Only twenty-four hours late!]

Robin Schlotz

The Queen of the Night's famous aria from Mozart's Die Zauberflöte is one of the most engaging pieces in the whole of classical opera. It's also one of the most difficult to sing, and normally only professional (lady) divas at the height of their careers even attempt it.

This wonderful little German lad has it off more or less pat.

OK, he's not perfect. But if he hits those high notes and you don't have chills running up and down your back, well, let's face it, this blog ain't really for you.

The Pedo Terrorists (and if you believe that you'll believe anything)

How bloody silly can you get? When the story of al-Qa'eda working with paedophiles on the Internet was first "leaked" to The Times last year I was tempted scoff, except that it seemed so ludicrous, and so obviously a piece of Government propaganda that I didn't even bother. I mean, after all, who in his right mind would believe this sort of rubbish?

Well, the Times report was actually put together by four different people, which rather makes one imagine they came up with late one night in the pub. The alternative possibility, which is more sinister, is that this was a genuine kite the Times was trying to fly. On whose behalf? Take a wild guess! (The [London] Times, for those that don't know, is a British 'paper that always supports the Government of the day, irrespective of whichever political party is in power.) Hilariously (or disturbingly) it's now been picked up by another of the Labour Government's poodles The Daily Mirror.

One of the team behind the Times piece was Richard Owen. One of the two names at the top of the Mirror report is Nick Owen. Coincidence? It's possible, I suppose. But is it more likely than that there are Muslim terrorists out there in cyber-space trying to avoid the attention of the online fuzz... by pretending to be paedophiles?

The funniest thing about the Times report is the it specifically excludes the possibility that they're not pretending. The Italian "anti-terror magistrate" Stefano Dambruoso has the money-quote.

I would exclude the idea that they have paedophile tendencies. The most you can attribute to them is a relationship between men and women different from that of us Westerners, in which — as in many parts of the Arab world — wives are often very young girls of 11, 12 or 13 who because of family negotiations are given in marriage to men much older than them. But that is not paedophilia, it is a question of Arab culture.

Riiight!

Can we can back to you on that one?

Return to Innocence

Now here's a movie I actually have seen. Return to Innocence is a good film in that it bravely makes a procative but important point. It's disappointing though in that it then doesn't really try to answer its own rhetorical question. And what it does instead is at time toe-curlingly embarrassing.

The point, which is perhaps rather too obvious even before the story has really got started, is that it's the men who care about boys the most who are most likely to be unjustly fingered for child molestation - with all the grisly and unnecessary penalties that go with it. After all, you'll probably not be done if you're genuinely innocent - at least not in this country - but you'll almost certainly lose your job and your reputation, quite possibly your marriage as well, and you'll never work with kids again.

All perfectly true, and indeed a dilemma that makes for a good drama! Celeb paediatrician and not-gay married man and father of boys gets stung by his yummy thirteen-year-old boy-patient. Unfortunately what we're then treated to is a quite straightforward courtroom-drama runaround. In true Perry Mason-style the dénouement hinges on a piece of evidence that only comes to light right at the last moment. And in fact we never actually find out what really happened. (The boy had a man's love-juice in his drawers - but we're not told whose or how it go there.)

What adds insult though is that the filmmakers here aren't quite sure what the difference is between a film that is "edgy" and taboo-busting, and one that is just vaguely distasteful. The attempts to be "frank" and "honest" and "graphic" in some of the descriptions of what did go on this boy's bedroom(s) are so misguided that at times they border on the comical. In fact the editing at the points where the actors start discussing "masturbation" and "semen" and "fellatio", and so on, is so hamfisted that the audience is left in little doubt that no children were actually present when these parts of the drama were being filmed. (Think of cutting in the Little Britain sketches of the Tory MP confessing all in front of the Press and his family.)

In much the same way, there's one bit when the hero of the story is arrested at his home in the company of his buck-naked little boy, who's just been skinning dipping and who promptly drops his towel in front of the politceman. Is this even supposed to be funny? If not, then why not? What might have made it unintentionally funny is that the lad in question is quite clearly wearing a rather fetching pair of Fruit of the Looms. When one then reflects that the director seems to have been so paranoid about being fingered for kiddie-fiddling himself that he even left in an obvious goof to let his audience know that no children were enjoyed harmed during the making of this picture, then suddenly the film starts to seem a good deal less bold and groundbreaking.

The attempt to make the hero into a "liberal" paediatrician is morally defensible but dramatically misguided. How is any normal audience supposed to warm to this man if even I didn't? And we're not talking about some sort of lovable curmudgeon with a heart of gold played by Sir Ben Kingsley, simply because the acting in this film is nowhere near good enough to pull off that sort of thing. The boy in question is certainly attractive, but even he's not really believable. (OK, I don't actually know that many sexually abused adolescent boys. But how difficult can it be for a boy simply to play... a boy?) And the ending is overly soppy and sentimental.

Yes, the "good pedo" is a character with a lot of dramatic potential. And in fact there are a couple of wonderful films such as The Man without a Face and The Ogre (both made before this film and at about the same time as each other) that do feature pedos (in all but name) who are nevertheless sympathetic and even heroic. Return to Innocence, for all its slighlty mealy-mouthed little sideline defences of intergenerational "sexual relationships" and even "boylove" doesn't even go that far. (That's bl for "research" purposes, by the way - and apparently that works for scoping out kiddie porn as well, provided the local fuzz are playing ball.)

This is film that could have been braver - but also it could have been just plain better.