During the Communist rule, free artistry was not something easily accepted in Soviet Russia. Art that did not serve the interests of the communist state was ignored, and art that directly antagonized communism was heavily persecuted. Art depicting nude boys, however, did not attempt against the state or anyone for that matter, so it was allowed. Below are eight beautiful examples of Soviet nude photography. Unfortunately, the artist is unknown.

Click on thumbnails to enlarge

“The yakut lesson” is a very touching story by former boylover.net admin and journalist Loren Robb. I’ve posted it here to preserve it’s legacy.

KOLYA

by Loren Robb

In 1987, Loren Robb, an independent New Zealand film maker, was in what was then still the Soviet Union, travelling the entire region throughout that year to produce a major documentary series about family life in the USSR. The last of those programs was filmed in a tiny and remote Arctic Siberian village among the native Evenki people. While he was there he drafted a feature movie story, for development as a unique co-production between the West and Moscow. In May 1990, Loren Robb returned to the Siberian village, to research the movie script, and to meet again the local village boy who had inspired it.

Part One: An Arctic Boy

It’s hard to get across to most people the immense size of the Soviet Union. You can talk statistics … a sixth of the planet’s land mass, eleven time zones wide. But statistics aside, it remains impossible for people who have not traveled it to really understand the scale of the place. It’s not just Russia, you know, it’s exactly what it calls itself, a union, a federation of 15 quite racially and culturally separate republics, each a massive country in itself. The USSR has a population of over 280 million, speaking more than 150 different languages. Perhaps the most graphic example of this scale is to speak of something I have actually experienced. I got on an aircraft one night in Moscow, one of those giant jet passenger planes about the size of a Western 747, and flew non-stop through the night for eleven hours. That’s a Los Angeles-to-London duration. But in the morning when we landed we were still in the Soviet Union. That’s how big it is.

I am on another plane right now, not a large jet this time, but an almost Snoopy-like bi-plane, one old propeller, two ski foils instead of wheels, and little disc portholes studded along the sides. The seats are steel slings folded down along each side of the cabin. Behind me are heaps of freight, crates, sacks, and mailbags. Forward the door hangs open into the cockpit where the two pilots are crouched over their panels, peering through the white outside. They are dressed in canvas and leather, like flying daredevils of the forties. But I’ve given up shouting against the noise of the engine, bad Russian through the cockpit door, and got out my pad to do this scribbling on my lap.

This old bi-plane is thudding me north into central Siberia. Through the scratches of the perspex porthole disc, all I can see below, in all directions and forever, is forest and snow, an ærial panorama of tiny leather-green trees frosted white wherever I look. A frozen white river winding through. The sky seems white as well. A misty gray view of infinity. It is endless now and it’s been endless for the last two days. We left then from the city of Irkutsk, the capital of this central Siberian province. That was in another, bigger aircraft, though still redolent of World War Two, the kind of plane I imagine Harrison Ford flying in one of those swash-buckling Stephen Spielberg movies. We flew due north from Irkutsk for five hours with the same endless unchanging view of white around us hour after hour, heading into the province’s most northerly region. It’s called Katanga, and it’s the size of California. Yet it has a population of only 8000.

I’ve been here before, of course. And I love it. I’m returning now, to a village near the Arctic Circle, a tiny frozen place where I left a part of myself.

Outsiders often picture Siberia as bleak and barren, a landscape of white and empty chill, flat and characterless, without grace, beauty, or colour. But in truth it is a land of exquisite beauty, gentle in the chalky tones of all the heavens’ lights, the pale gold of a distant low-slung midday sun, the pinks and violets of evening, the purple blacks of night.

In such a landscape people live, dotted in tiny and infrequent villages across the highland plateaus of the arctic north. Remote outposts of human life, these little log-cabin clusters nestle in groups among the delicate black boughs and fine tracery of birch and spruce forest, hugging the river banks with a warmth of spirit that defies the brutal chill beyond them. Their timbers glow gold against the pastels of the ice and snow. They are isolated from the world at large, and from each other, separated often by a hundred kilometres or more of the endless Siberian forest. Each is a society in itself, alone, complete.

Nakanno is such a place.

It’s an Evenki village, a home for about 200 of these indigenous Siberian people. It sits circled by forest on a shallow cliff overlooking the wide and wandering Lower Tunguska River, one of the major waterways of central northern Siberia. It is a very pretty village of golden wood iced white with the fairytale candy of deep winter snow, its edges softened by the gentle blanket curves. It is a little south of the Arctic Circle and the tree line that marks the northern edge of the forest, beyond which nothing grows but stalks of polar grass, until further north even they cease to survive. Nakanno hovers there on the planet’s northern brink of human possibility. It is eighteen months now since I first saw Nakanno, and that was from the air as well. I fell in love with it instantly, partly for its sheer physical beauty and its remote otherworld ambience, partly for the intense feeling I had that I was somehow coming home. As we landed there that first day I seemed to know the place, I felt that compelling and comforting sense of déja-vu. We were welcomed there, struggling off the aircraft into the arctic chill and snow, by the village chief, Sasha, a large and strong Evenki man, always grinning, always seeming about to hug you. He told us we were the first outsiders to come to the village for 21 years. That, he remembered, had been a Swedish photographer. We were thus honoured guests. He led us to the school, explaining that the village had no guest-house, but that we were to be accommodated at the school.

Most of these villages have no school. Nakanno has. It’s something of a local centre, a focal point for other Evenki who live hundreds of kilometres away in even smaller settlements tucked here and there through the forest. Its clutch of cabins, all heavy log outer walls round vast wood-burning stoves, is mostly small homes, but it also includes some community buildings … the school, a supply store, a clinic, a trapping store, and a little village hall which boasts two stoves for extra heat. There’s a postal office too, at the edge of the village next to the flat area that serves as the landing field for this little bi-plane. It comes regularly, to deliver supplies and to pick up the mail or anyone traveling between these tiny towns.

Nakanno seems, however, a smaller place than this, for its population is never all in the village at any time. Most of the men are trappers, spending long weeks away, gathering the pelts of arctic hare, of stoat and sable, which form the basis of the village economy. A few others tend the village’s reindeer herds, in a valley far to the north. Some hunt for elk. Usually, the only men in town are the elderly or the few who daily service the water, firewood, and other needs of the houses. Nakanno seems, therefore, a town of women and children.

There are 40 children in the village, and 15 of them are not from Nakanno but from the smaller villages elsewhere through the forest, and they’re sent here every autumn for their months of schooling. They live at the school. Now, as we followed Sasha there, crunching our way between the cabins, our alpine boots squeaking on the ice and snow, the children cavorted around us, tiny faces like Eskimo dolls peeking out from the swathes of fur. Nobody under 21 had ever seen a foreigner before. Dressed in our high-tech arctic gear, with the shiny aluminum crates of our equipment being off-loaded from plane to sleds, we must have seemed like Martians to them all. They tumbled with us into the warmth of the school building, stomping the snow from their boots, chattering like oriental monkeys, vying with each other for the favour of helping to carry in our gear from the sleds. The school was a large building, of logs too, but rambling with rooms and wood-stoves.

The villagers had prepared beds for us in the children’s play room and lounge, and there we unpacked. The children watched us.

“Kam-pooter, kam-pooter,” they whispered as I pulled my computer out of its traveling case.

“Foto-apparat,” they confirmed with each other, seeing the cameras revealed. “Vid-ee-oh, vid-ee-oh.” To them, the room must have seemed transformed by us and our equipment, from its wooden simplicity to something resembling the flight deck of a space ship, as electronic equipment piled itself around the walls and on all the tables.

But eventually they left us alone, and we slept. We were at the end of six months’ television production in the USSR. We had filmed already the material for five hours of documentary programs, and this was the last. We had been working daily throughout the six months, moving constantly from one end of the Soviet Union to the other, all our precious time off dominated by traveling. We had three weeks left now to film the final program. But we were exhausted. Physically, of course, from the work and travel. Mentally too, from the strain of constant negotiations in ever-changing foreign tongues. And most of all, emotionally exhausted, from the cultural changes we were putting ourselves through every day, every week. Now Russia, now Georgia, now Soviet Asia. And last and most bizarre of all, Arctic Siberia.

Yet the very remoteness of the village turned out to be what we needed. Its isolation breeds humanity and hospitality. We found ourselves surrounded by goodwill and peace in a way we had not had time to achieve anywhere else.

Certainly for me, it was a place to stop and think again.

On top of the overwhelming cultural strains, the work, and the daily problems, this year of production had represented for me another emotional hurdle as well, a trauma I had not anticipated. It was the year my marriage finally collapsed. I had thought it a workable marriage, though I’d recognised the difficulties. But it had come to a head on this trip. Sally was now back in London, with someone else. Common enough, I suppose. Still, I had to come to terms with this, and with who I would now be, and with the fact that I had never achieved the family I had spent half my life yearning for.

Here, in Nakanno, I found the time to start thinking this through. And it was here too that I discovered a new rôle. If not husband, at least father.

Sasha the chief turned up later with a dead elk. He stood outside the school with the beast on the ground beside him.

“This is for you all while you’re here,” he said. I looked at the skinned and blood-blotched creature in the snow.

“But what can we do with it?” I said, wondering where to put this enormous and rather gruesome body of meat.

“Eat it,” he said. Then he realised what I meant. “Oh, don’t worry. It’s frozen already. Nothing will happen to it. Just cut pieces off and cook them.”

He was right, of course. We hauled it into an unheated storeroom behind the school kitchen, and there it lay for three weeks, frozen solid in the sub-zero chill of the air. The villagers who came to cook for us simply kept hacking pieces off it. We ate that elk three times a day … stewed, fried, boiled, roasted, we ate it as soup, as stew, and as simple flesh. But always the elk, morning, noon, and night. Later in our stay we were offered the treat of fresh elk liver, frozen but raw. I turned it down, squeamish about it. But it answered a question for me. The Evenki diet is so meat-oriented that I could not see how they maintained a healthy balance. There are few herbs and vegetables, and no fruit but bilberries. Instead, they remove the liver from slaughtered elk and deer. It freezes in minutes, and they slice it and eat it like blood-red popsicles. It provides the vitamins and minerals their diet otherwise lacks.

But I couldn’t bring myself to share this treat. They were not offended. Later again, they gave us the antlers from the beast we had eaten. Fourteen-point antlers that grace our sound recordist’s Auckland home to this day.

It was after our dinners each evening that we’d watch our material from the day, played back on the video recorders. We were not shooting film, but tape, and this meant each day we could immediately see what we had shot. The children quickly cottoned on to this. At dinner on only the third night we heard soft clattering outside in the corridor. A noisy mystery. When we finished eating and returned to the lounge that was our bedroom we found them, all the school boarders, sitting in rows on chairs they had brought to the room, waiting patiently, a junior audience to see our little cinema. It became their evening habit for the three weeks we were there. They saw, of course, not just their village, but themselves. For we filmed the children often. They were the life of the village, it seemed to me, and their play was the village’s spirit. We captured it daily on tape, and it’s a major feature of the program.

But I noticed on the first night of the ‘cinema’ show that one child was missing. It was a boy I had seen that same day.

Our first day’s shooting had started with the children. We filmed them in one of their roly-poly piggy-back games outside the school. They clung around us, fascinated by our equipment, our clothes, and by what we were doing. We let them look through the viewfinders at each other, and listen on headphones to the sounds caught by our microphones. But one child hung back. I’d looked up at some moment and seen him for the first time, a dark boy in the distance, hovering away from us by the corner of the school. When I looked again he was gone.

All day I kept noticing this boy, a silhouette of fur hat and coat, dark eyes staring at me from afar. Then gone. Like a shy little sprite of the arctic woods, stalking me, he hovered each time but never approached, he was glimpsed but hardly seen.

When I didn’t spot him at the screening of our rushes that night, I wondered where and who he was.

The next day I caught him. Staring at me again from the edge of a building. This time I did not look away. I walked directly towards him, and he stood there like a nervous mirage, not magically disappearing now, but transfixed by my approach.

“Hello,” I said, in my basic Russian. “What’s your name?”

“Kolya,” he said, and then blushed. “And you’re Loren.” I suppose he’d simply asked the others, but at the time it seemed magic too that he already knew me.

“Do you live at the school?” I said. He nodded. “You did not come to see the video last night.” He shrugged and blushed. “Tonight,” I told him, “you come with the others. You come too.”

That evening after dinner he was there with the other children, waiting for me to return from eating the elk. He made me sit on his chair, and he himself sat on the floor in front of me. We watched our rushes, discussing them amongst ourselves in English above the foreign whoops of merriment of the children around us as they saw their village re-created on video. I sat there, absorbing the filmed material, my mind planning what was missing, what we had, what we needed, and this boy, Kolya, leaning back against my knees. At one moment I put my hand on his shoulder with absent-minded affection, and he took it and held it there like a reassurance. It moved me.

We made our program. We filmed all we needed there, and we left satisfied, the series complete. But for me the three weeks in Nakanno became something else altogether. Not the end of an exhausting production. A beginning rather, of what has become a new stage of my own life. That short time in Nakanno became, for me, the discovery of Kolya.

He’s a bright boy. He showed me his school books one day and the village teacher told me he was one of the best pupils in the school. Most of the children finish school at fifteen, their eighth year of education. They stay then, as young adults, the girls to run the village, the boys to become hunters and trappers. A few leave. The brightest may continue their education. It means traveling hundreds of kilometres south to the only large town in the Katanga region, where there’s a higher school. And even fewer go on to college and university at 17, for that means a journey of thousands of kilometres, south again to the provincial capital, Irkutsk.

Kolya should aim for this, the teacher told me. But the odds were that he would not. Like most of his companions, he planned to leave school at 15 and become a hunter. It was all he could imagine doing.

Still, he was interested in other things, at least fascinated by them. He wanted to know how to operate my computer. I showed him. He mastered it in a day, drew pictures with the art program, wrote letters to me with the word processor, which can type in Russian, and played endless games. He wanted to try my stills camera. I taught him to use it. He wandered about taking photos of his friends and of me. He was fascinated by my electric torch, my watch, my calculator, and all the other tiny sophistications I had with me. I lent him these things from day to day, and he used them proudly.

“Kolya, when I get home,” I said to him one afternoon, “I’ll send you something from New Zealand. A present. Anything you like.” I thought an open choice was a safe bet … there’d be nothing in the world that he could think of which would cost me very much. He looked at me oddly. “So tell me,” I said. “What sort of thing would you like?”

“But I don’t need anything,” he said straight away. “I already have everything I need.” This answer, this instant response, sounds too glib, yet it’s true. From a boy who has … by the standards of my world … nothing at all. Just the clothes that he wears. Still, in all the next week he never came up with a single idea of anything he might want, and I began to perceive that to send him almost anything was potentially to destroy this purity, to seduce him into a whole milieu of materialism and desire, and all the artificially induced frustrations of my consumerist society so foreign to his own life.

I didn’t ask him again what he wanted from the West. In fact I learned in the weeks I was with him that he was right. He truly didn’t need any of it. We had arrived with so much technology it is almost frightening. Much of it is in the sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut category, I realise now. At the silly end of the scale was my electric toothbrush. When the batteries ran down I found myself having to brush my teeth with it manually, and used thus it became ridiculously unwieldy. Kolya roared with laughter at this, and he was right … stupid techno-dependent “westerner”, for sure.

On the more serious side were the balaclavas. We all wore knitted woollen balaclavas, at least for the first couple of days. The outside temperatures were lower than 65° below zero … three times colder than a domestic freezer. It’s hard to explain that sort of temperature. It’s not so much cold as alien. Your spit freezes before it reaches the ground. Your nostrils form instant icicles inside with every breath. You exhale thick white steam which crackles in the silent air, crystalising as soon as it leaves your lips. It was Kolya, newly befriended, who told me to take off the balaclava.

It traps the moisture in your breath as you exhale, which instantly turns to crystals of ice. Within minutes the face of the balaclava is cold and hard, a mask of solid ice. Kolya warned me that breathing the iced air through the fabric across my mouth would make me ill. With pneumonia, I later discovered. He taught me to wear nothing on my face, but to keep rubbing my skin so the blood would circulate, preventing frostbite. The Evenki habitually watch each other’s faces when they’re outside, looking for the signs of frostbite, warning each other if they forget to rub their skin.

I thanked Kolya for the little lesson. It was the first of many, in reply perhaps for what I was teaching him about computers, cameras, and life in the West. One day I walked with our interpreter through the village, enjoying a moment of freedom from filming.

“The villagers have asked me to thank you,” Yura said. “They see your relationship with Kolya, and they’re grateful for your attentions to him.” I was surprised, but flattered.

“It’s nothing. He’s a nice boy. I like him. I’m teaching him a lot that he’s interested in.”

“Everyone sees that,” he said. “You’ve both grown very fond of each other. But it’s not what you teach him. It’s the relationship that matters. They’re pleased you don’t patronise him. You treat him well.”

“How else?”

“Well, you see, Kolya is special in the village. He’s not Evenki, you know, but Yakut. A different people. And … well … he’s not an orphan exactly, but in a way he has no family.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s difficult,” Yura said. “His parents are not … well, there are problems at home. He doesn’t live with them. In fact he is a ward of the state. He sees his parents from time to time.”

People were loathe to tell me what this was about. Looking back now, I realise what it probably meant. If the parents were alcoholics they’d have had Kolya removed from their care, at least by the time he was seven and started school. Kolya, in a sense, was a dispossessed boy. For six years he had lived at this school house, six years with parents only as a remote couple whom he visited, “from time to time” as Yura had put it.

A boy of thirteen is at an awkward stage. It’s the time of passage, his transition from young child to young man, a time when he seeks support and a model. Kolya, instinctively desperate for this, despite having a village of adults to choose from, had somehow chosen me. I talked to him myself about it later.

“Kolya,” I said, holding onto his hands, “I heard today about your family.” I stopped. Kolya sat grim and silent. Eventually I spoke again. “If you want, I can be like a father for you, but only while I’m here. Perhaps after I go we can write to each other.”

Kolya stared at me and I couldn’t interpret what was in his eyes. He has a handsome young face, skin brown as autumn, large orient eyes as black as birch-bark. But it gives away little. He stares moodily at you and you can see his mind working but you don’t know in what direction. Without warning and without a word he stood up, pulled away his hands, and walked out.

He came back late in the evening. He was very tense, nervous, upset.

“I want to talk to you,” he said, grim. I followed him outside into the chill and dark. Alone with me he stood and waved at the forest all around the village. “I’m thirteen,” he said. “I’m not a child. I go alone into the forest. It’s forbidden for children.” I nodded. I knew this: the forest is dangerous, the domain of wolves. Satisfied I’d taken the point, he continued. “I’m brave,” he said. “I’m not a baby. I hunt and fish. I walk by myself. If an animal attacks, I kill it.” He acted all this out in front of me, the solitary forest walk, the attack by a bear or wolf, his bravery, the kill.

“I don’t think you’re a baby,” I said. “I know you’re big now, and strong.”

“And brave,” he said. “I don’t need to have parents. OK?”

“OK,” I nodded. But he went through it all again. Three times he acted out for me this single point … that he was grown now, and full of strength and courage. I agreed all three times. He stood facing me, almost trembling with the importance of what he was telling me.

“You are my friend,” he said. His mouth started to wobble. “Not my father.” And then he began to weep. I folded him up in my arms and he held me terribly tight, shuddering with sobs.

“Sometimes,” I said, “It’s all right to be a child. Just to be a boy once more.”

We didn’t talk about this again. I never mentioned the word ‘father’ any more, and I never suggested we were anything but simple friends. Yet Kolya stood somehow closer to me than before, stood right next to me now in his young life, accepting at last perhaps the precious parenting he needed so much. I had something to accept too. A kind of responsibility I hadn’t known. He’d walked into the gap I have held all my life for a child. I’d walked into a gap in his life too. The magnetism between those two gaps, like the attractive pulse of two awesome black holes in space, could be felt, irresistible between us.

A few evenings later we filmed the boys from the school in their weekly bath session. On Wednesdays they stoke up the wood stove in their own little bath house behind the school until it’s as hot as a Scandinavian sauna. Water boils on the fire, and other barrels of water stand cold around the wooden platform that’s against one wall. The children frolic in there for an hour or more, soaping and rinsing each other until they shine. Then, hot and clean, they run naked out into the frozen night, rolling in the snow at an incredible temperature of 65° below. But apart from the sheer shock of seeing them cavorting bare in the snow, what fascinated me more was that they had washed each other. There’s a kinship between all these people which binds them like family. They walk arm in arm, they cling to each other freely, they display their friendship without embarrassment.

After the filming, Kolya, who had stage-managed the whole bath night sequence with his friends for us, asked me to stay back.

“I want to wash you,” he said, when everyone had left. And quietly, with an almost Japanese grace and care, he proceeded to do that, lathering me from head to foot, and cleaning me with gentle affection, rinsing me with water he had delicately mixed for temperature. I think for Kolya this gift was a symbol of his fellowship with me.

I tried to explain to him about my departure, about how very soon I would be going away to my own country and possibly could never come back, though I promised to write. He needed, I told him, to accept our relationship as the necessarily brief one it was, though meaningful. He shook his head.

“Now that we’ve met,” he said, “nothing can separate us. Only kilometres.”

There’s a deep humanity about these people that I love. It’s a brand of directness and honesty which I never knew was lacking in my own society, my own life. I’ve thought about this a great deal since I first came across it, and I cannot even imagine a word in my own language for this quality. It has so many faces.

One is a total lack of patronisation, an uncompromising respect for everyone.

I wanted to take some still pictures one morning, of the children playing outside. However, the few youngsters I saw around the school right then seemed intent on other pursuits. I went up to the woman who cooked for the kids in the schoolhouse.

“I’d like to get some shots of the children,” I said. “Shots of them playing outside. I wondered who could help organise that for me.” She looked at me oddly. I started again. “I just need some help arranging it for a few minutes.” I smiled. She grinned back at me, still with a slight amazement on her face.

“Ask the children,” she said. “If they want to play for you, they will.”

For a moment I flummoxed about, still mentally hunting a grown-up to help. Then I saw she was right. I have great respect for kids, but it never occurred to me to go directly to them, to seek their permission, let alone their own organising. I’m stuck in that perhaps Western attitude, the one that says kids need to be governed, presumably by adults. These youngsters were aged from six to about 12. But they’re remarkably capable of organising themselves. And here in Nakanno, remarkably respected too, with an absolute right over their own activities and time.

Another facet of this humanity, this direct honesty, as I’m calling it, is a kind of simplicity in the approach to things. An uncomplicated way of seeing the environment, or the situation in which we find ourselves.

I arrived in the village with every high-tech advantage I could gather, and this vast kit of space-age equipment included some terribly expensive Austrian snow boots, triple-layered complex things which take me ten minutes to get into, are stiff and uncomfortable, and actually cold anyway. I forgive the boots for being cold. There’s not a lot you can do about temperatures like 65° below. Half an hour out there and your toes are like popsicles whatever you wear.

But I’m impressed by the local boots. They’re soft and comfortable, don’t squeak like horse-hooves in the snow, and they must be warm, if I can go on the fact that the locals stand around outside for quite long periods. I asked Sasha one day about the boots.

“I’d like to get a pair of those,” I said. “They seem far more practical than mine.” He laughed, and nodded.

“Yes,” he said, “but you can’t get a pair. We have to make them especially, and you’re not here for long enough.”

“What are they made from.” I imagined various romantic possibilities, reindeer the most likely.

“Horses,” Sasha said. “The skin from the legs of the ponies.” I looked obediently amazed. “It’s very thick skin, you know, and very hairy. And by the time they die, it’s been standing in the snow for twenty years. It works. It’s very convenient. We have plenty of horses.” He laughed again at my astonishment. “But no dead ones right now, for you.”

I fitted this simple solution into my emerging picture of life in Nakanno, adding it to the list of low-tech approaches I was learning.

“I love the way that everything here is solved so effortlessly,” I told Sasha. “It’s wonderful, really. In my own country, we solve problems with technology, usually with highly complex answers.”

“The solution to every problem is simple,” Sasha said. “It is right there, you know, inside the problem.” So there’s wisdom too, in this directness, this honesty that I call humanity. One day in the last week I was talking again to Kolya. He’d asked incessant questions about Western life, or just city life, and seen many photographs. I made the comment that where I came from life was less risky than in Nakanno, less potentially threatening to survival. Kolya thought about that for a few moments. We were walking through the trees in the forest that skirts the village. I used his silence to watch the traceries of ice on the branches of all the frozen birch around us.

“Yes,” he said eventually. “I think in your place you have no dangers now, from wolves, or from cold. And we do.” I agreed, grinning at the image. We had conquered most of that. “But I think,” he went on, rather unexpectedly, “that you have dangers from each other. And we do not.” Now it was my turn for silence. In a growing awe at the unconscious profundity of this statement I remembered the one amazing fact that seems now most relevant of all. This boy, this incisive, perceptive boy, is just 13 years old. But his wisdom is not unique, nor learned, nor dependent on his age and experience. I think his wisdom is natural, a sense of simple truth which I am calling humanity, and I think it was born in him as it is in all his arctic people.

All the time I was in Nakanno I thought that I was teaching Kolya about my life, my skills, and the technology of my world. I was doing that, of course, and he was soaking up the lessons, hungry for information and knowledge and understanding beyond the confines of his own remote village. But I never realised until the end that he had been teaching me as well, not just the art of survival in his brutal environment, but a lesson far more important than anything I had to offer him. He had been teaching me to be a human. I saw now that I came from a society so skilled in technology that it was in constant danger of forgetting that there was anything else. We can surround ourselves with material protections against real life. We can unwittingly become what we own, what we wear, what we buy. In Kolya’s village there are no protections. Life is raw and harsh. People are what matters, and people in that village know who they are. Not what they wear, for they all wear the same clothes. Not what they achieve materially, for what they achieve is survival. Not how well they conquer nature, for they do not, rather they exist within it, in a natural harmony.

I learned from Kolya that it is not a question of my society teaching skills to his. We both have a gift for each other. I can teach Kolya about computers. He can teach me about humans. In the same way our societies can exchange the gifts of what they have to offer. It’s that exchange, that sharing, which matters. We all have much to learn.

Eighteen months ago I left Kolya in that village. I did not want to. And perhaps I needn’t have. Sasha sat me down one day and asked me point blank, without preamble:

“Do you want to adopt Kolya?” It took me utterly by surprise that such a thing as this blatant offer was even possible, but in a flash I knew what my answer was, what it fully was.

“Yes, I do,” I said, “but I don’t think it’s the right thing. I think he should grow up here, in his own culture and his own land.”

But Kolya himself made it a tough decision. Our departure day inevitably arrived. We heard the bi-plane, as you can in the still of a Siberian winter, ten minutes before it was visible. When it landed, slicing on its skis onto the soft powder snow of the airstrip, we were ready to get aboard. The gear was loaded, crate after aluminum crate, and at last everyone clambered into the hatchway on the side. I hung around beside the aircraft, hesitant about getting on board, looking down at Kolya. He’d been given the morning off school so that he could walk out with me to the airstrip. The other villagers, Sasha the chief, Katya the schoolteacher, old Tatyana, Seriozha the hunter, and many more, stood back from the bi-plane. There was a shout from inside for me to get on board. I heard the engines revving up. I pulled Kolya into me and hugged him, shutting my eyes and feeling like I was abandoning him.

“You know that I’ll write,” I said. “And send you things.” He didn’t answer that, but drew my head down and pressed his mouth to my ear, whispering at last the special word that had hung unsaid between us.

“Just be my father,” he breathed in my ear.

When at last I released him, tore him from me, and stumbled into the cold body of the plane I was blind with tears. Sometimes I think I have cried all the way from there until now. As the plane rose above the village and forest I looked out the tiny round window at the whitescape below and saw Kolya alone, standing out on the airstrip, a tiny black figure in a field of snow. The others had all turned away and were walking back into the warmth of the village. Kolya, a single dark shape on the white, watched me climb away, and I watched him standing there in his characteristic posture, his body cocked to one side, his fur hat tipped back, until he was a dot, and then gone. I have read in countless books the words ‘torn apart’, and now I knew the feeling of that, like some physical part of me wrenched away, left down there in the arctic wilderness, a small part I was abandoning too soon.

In the days after I left, two days in the provincial capital, and a week in Moscow, I found myself stitching together the pieces of a new story, a fictional tale about a Western man and a Siberian boy whose gifts to each other are knowledge and humanity.

I was trying, of course, to say something of what I am touching on here, about the difference between a vast technological society and a tiny human one, and about the mutual affection with which we all must approach the sharing of this planet and our human heritage.

Big words, but I think there’s an important truth in here somewhere, that as individuals, as societies, even as nations, we must begin, not to patronise one another but to love and to share one another, to give what we have. We can all teach what we know. We must also learn what we need to know. Admitting that is hard sometimes.

The story is called The Yakut Lesson and it’s a personal story. It’s not about nations and societies at all, really, though it may seem to be. It’s just about two people, and a kind of caring that has been sparingly ever dealt with before. I think it has something to say, about love, about respect, and about the kind of wisdom and humanity which I re-discovered in Nakanno and in Kolya.

I’ve been lucky. The Yakut Lesson has attracted some attention. It’s planned now as a movie, a feature film, which will be the first co-production between New Zealand and the Soviet Union. Hopefully, if the rest of the finance is secured, it can be filmed in the next year or so. Kolya’s gift to me then can be a gift to any audience who have the wit to see the truth. And luckily too, this movie, or rather its development, has brought me back here. I’ve been writing this for an hour or so now. I know that the village must be nearby, somewhere below us in the thawing winterland, this early Spring.

I have spent the last eighteen months back in the South Pacific a lot of the time, completing the documentaries we shot here, and then developing this new feature film. Kolya and I have written to each other throughout that time, and I have sent him things which I think will please him, and suit his few material needs. Recently I wrote and told him I was coming back. He has asked me when this would happen in every letter he’s written. Best of all, I surprised him with other news. That I’d gained permission to take him to New Zealand for a holiday.

His last school exams this year are on June 10. A few weeks from now, his northern school year over, he will fly with me to see my country, my culture, and my home. I feel like a father, gathering up my missing son. But I can’t help wondering what it is like for him. Does he feel like a son? Waiting for my arrival. Right now I imagine him, hearing this old bi-plane ten minutes before he can see it, running out to the airfield, re-living perhaps that other moment when he stood there alone with the same plane tearing me away from him into the sky. Now it is bringing me back.

In the sequel to this story Loren and Kolya meet again in the Siberian village after their 18-month separation. Kolya completes his compulsory schooling and leaves his tiny village for the first time … to travel out of the remote Arctic, across the Soviet Union, and around the world. From New Zealand, Loren tells of this journey and the changes it makes to Kolya.

Part Two: From Russia With Love

Yesterday the sun was trying to get through, and occasionally it did. A typical Auckland winter day it was, a little cold, damp from intermittent rain that had been spitting on and off since I’d woken up, and the sky patterned with patches of light cloud among the leaden gray which kept making fickle promises about the weak sunshine.I was at Rainbow’s End, a fun park south of Auckland city. Typical too I suppose, as a place to be for a weekend day out, in northern New Zealand. There I stood in this uncertain weather, glad I’d brought my heavy jacket, and nibbling on something called a Chico Dog … a bread roll stuffed with hot beef and cheese as it turned out. I was watching three equally typical New Zealand teenage boys, loping up the path after a ride on the Corkscrew roller coaster. I’d denied myself that particular thrill, me the typical adult, waiting aside, holding the coats, paying for the food and the Cokes.

The three boys tumbled towards me, tall Aaron striding out with his long legs, serious Rhys hanging back in silent reverie, and the small dark boy between them still bubbling with the glee of the Corkscrew ride, literally bouncing along, arms waving, eyes ablaze, face wide with laughter. I felt happily middle-aged watching them approach. They were all three indistinguishable from any other New Zealand kids out at the fun park on the weekend … stone-washed jeans, sweatshirts with messages on them, casual zipper jackets, and those clunky sneakers they all wear these days with the racing stripes and the laces tied so the tongue flaps out at the front. They stopped in front of me, Aaron still laughing at the parody performances of his fun-filled companion.

“Must be time to eat,” he said. Rhys, beside him, nodded quietly, and the dark boy’s eyes sparkled.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go. Chico Dogs? Three for me. And Coca Cola.”

They raced off ahead of me, the dark boy fishing in his jeans for his wallet, and my heart watching him with a tremendous ache of pride and love. For this boy is not the typical New Zealand kid he appears at all.

He is Kolya, and only eleven weeks ago he had never left his native Siberian village, never had a wallet, never heard of a Chico Dog, let alone a thrill-packed fun park. These things in themselves may not have much importance … they’re Western frivolities only … but what gave me such pleasure was seeing how much Kolya had assimilated, how much he had learned, how utterly he fitted in, and how happy he was.

The world outside the Arctic Circle, and all the trappings and ways of towns, cities, and people, of technology and modernity, of fun, fashion, and frivolity, are completely new to Kolya, yet in eleven short weeks he has expanded himself into it all with breath-taking speed. He has blossomed so far beyond his remote arctic origins that I know now he will never truly go back. He will of course physically go back, and may even spend the rest of his life, as his Yakut people would expect, being the wolf-hunter he would anyway have been, but I mean that now he will never be closeted by it, never stifled. His eager, hungry mind has at last bloomed beyond that, and he has found and grown into the wider world he yearned for so much when he first met me. He will always now feel fulfilled. I am pleased about that.

But I am pleased most of all that he is happy. For I suspect that it’s a depth of happiness that he has never known, though he’s needed it all his fourteen years. It’s not just the physical happiness of the good times he’s had on this trip to New Zealand, and with the friends he’s made like Rhys and Aaron from the Russian language class at an Auckland high school. Nor is it only the fulfilling mental happiness of having at last touched and learned the ways of the world outside his arctic village. I see in him now a deeper emotional happiness too, a satisfaction to the core, that stems from his discovery of himself, of what he’s capable of, and of what it’s like to be valued, cared for, what it’s like to be loved. He needed to be parented and at last I think he has achieved that. It has given him strength.

This transition, from a dispossessed boy to a fulfilled teenager excited about his own future, has been staggeringly fast, but it has not been easy. He has had to go simultaneously through two enormous traumas. First, the immense cultural shock of living every moment in an utterly foreign environment. Second, the tortuous business of learning to be a son. It’s been very tough on both of us for I too had much to learn, at least about the parenting. But for Kolya it’s been that double hit of culture shock and emotional trauma. I’m amazed that he has succeeded so well in such a short time. The culture shock alone would have wiped me out long ago. Learning to be a father almost has.

You might call Kolya an Eskimo. He’s not.

In fact, though we throw this word around a great deal, I’m not sure I know of any peoples who actually call themselves ‘Eskimo’. Each of the races indigenous to the Arctic Circle … and there are a number of racial groups there … have their own unique name for themselves. In USA and Canada it may be Inuit; in Siberia, Buryat or Evenki, or any one of a number of other groups, most of them related to one another in some part of their history. But Kolya is a Yakut boy, and the Yakut people derive originally from further south, in ancient times possibly related to the Persians. They are also, because of the land bridge that once existed between Siberia and Alaska, directly related to the Native Americans of the USA plains … the Sioux, Cheyenne, Blackfoot, and Crow.

You probably have no image of a Siberian Yakut, but if you picture for yourself a young American Cheyenne boy, with all that cultural imagery, and transplant him into an arctic environment, you’ll have a visual idea of who and what Kolya is.

He lives in one of the most remote inhabited areas of the planet … and one of the coldest. Though there are a few brief weeks of surprisingly warm summer, ten months of the year are dominated by ice, snow, and sub-zero temperatures which reach an inconceivable 65° below or more by the turn of the year.

His village is a cluster of log cabins nestled alone in the Siberian forest, on the banks of a wide frozen river, the nearest neighbors hundreds of kilometres away, with no roads between them. Contact with the outside world is by radio-telegraph only, and through the visits of an infrequent old bi-plane which drops in with mail and supplies when the weather permits. Otherwise the life of the village revolves entirely around survival and the economy depends entirely on hunting and trapping.

Until eleven weeks ago, therefore, Kolya had never seen any of the millions of tiny things that we all take so much for granted … door handles and locks, water taps, showers, baths, fresh fruit and vegetables, shops, motor cars, roads, any building not made of logs.

For him these last weeks have been overwhelming, a flood of new experiences every moment of every day. And to cap it off, all dealt with in a foreign country, with a foreign language and a foreign culture. This would be hard enough on any of us, but for a boy from the Arctic who has never moved out of his village in his life it has been like traveling to another planet. Yet the other trauma we have both simultaneously gone through has in fact been the much deeper upheaval. He’s had to learn to be parented, to be a son. I’ve had to learn to be the parent. This has been devastatingly tough on both of us. I think we have won.

All my life I have imagined myself as a father. Even when I was a child, I recall picturing my future, the vague image always filled out with the trappings of house, car, loving wife, and a bunch of children, all faceless but happy, of course.

I grew up in the fifties and this is what people did. They left school, got a job, had success, got married to someone very beautiful, and surrounded themselves with cheerful children. It made sense to me then. I could understand the circle of it, on and on, the natural and never-ending rhythm of human life.

As a young man that expectation hardly changed. This was years before I first began to understand that women were … like men … something more than just a rôle, just wives and mothers, just soft smiling things waiting at home. So I still imagined myself heading for an automatic happiness in marriage and parenthood.

My actual marriage taught me a great deal about reality, and about women as people. It also taught me that it takes two to make a baby. You may think this is moderately obvious, but I had hardly before imagined that any ‘wife’ would not also automatically be a ‘mother’. But Sally did not want children. She was, of course, right. We were both so dedicated to our separate careers at the time we married, and both so ambitious, that to complicate matters with her dutifully giving birth to babies and trapping herself at home would have been the most horrendous mistake. I would have thought I was happy. She would have known she was not. It’s a common enough situation, but we avoided it, largely by her determination.

In any event, the marriage, later, did not work out. This is common enough too, and makes me glad in a way that when we split it was only the two of us who were involved. But it did mean that I was alone again, without the comfortably warm wife I had pictured all those years, and without the happy brood of self-reproductions around me. And as time moved on and I felt older and less like changing myself again to fit in with another person, it became less and less likely that I would achieve it at all.

For the last few years I have been settling down into the idea that I will continue to live alone, be responsible only to myself, and try to live out my life happy in all the other things which I’ve fulfilled.

And then I went to Siberia.

I stood there in the snow, truly at the edge of the earth, as far from all I knew as it’s possible to be, as foreign in that tiny village as it’s possible to imagine, and a young boy stared at me there, stared for three days with penetrating eyes that drilled me to the soul. He needed a father, and somehow he knew that I needed a son.

I was catapulted into parenthood.

I think Kolya instinctively understood this was happening from the very beginning. It was me who took so long to come around to it. At first I simply responded to his needs in the village, giving him a temporary kind of pseudo-parenting. Later I responded to his letters, with advice and growing affection. But in the end I bit the bullet. I went back, as he was wanting me to, nearly 18 months after I’d met him, and brought him away. It’s only been for three months. He returns to school in Siberia in September. But it’s a precious three months for both of us. He’s 14 now, and these three months are his one shot at being a child, at having a father. They are my one shot too, at providing for him, hugging him, loving him, at being the person he needs me to be. We will spend time together in the future, that’s certain now. But he’ll be a young adult then, this unique moment passed. It’s now and only now, during this time of his critical passage from boy to man, that we can be what we both need for each other … father and son … in a way that is only possible once.

Of course it’s been a joy to me to to watch him absorbing everything he sees with such avid interest, with such intense delight. I have loved every second of his time here, loved sharing with him all these discoveries. But more than any of that I have simply loved him.

It’s hard for a man to come to terms with this, with loving a boy in this way. There’s a program in me somewhere which says that love is a word to use sparingly, between myself and my wife perhaps, or at least a woman of my generation. I feel bound to avoid the word ‘love’ with Kolya, and say instead that I am fond of him, that I care for him, that I like him a lot. But all this is just Western ethic getting in the way of truth. I have learned heaps in the last few months. Most of all I have learned how to love. And Kolya has learned how to be loved. It was a lesson we both had to go through. New for both of us.

When I first got back to his tiny village we had to discover each other all over again. I didn’t find the lovely boy I thought I’d left there all that time ago, and he didn’t find, I’m sure, the idealised man who had been writing to him since that day. Both of us found someone real. It was hard to replace the dream with the reality. The romance was shattered. What replaced it was often hard to take.

Kolya was not even waiting for me at the airfield. There was a small cluster of people staring, some of them youngsters, none of them Kolya, and my old friend Sasha the chief walking out to greet me. But Kolya had disappeared.

Sasha and I trudged alone to my quarters, a log cabin that was now used as a guest house. I settled in, and busied myself with unpacking, making some of the coffee I’d brought along, and planning how I thought the next five weeks would go.

It was hours later as evening approached that I sensed a movement at the door. I was lying on the bed, eyes closed, thinking ahead, when I heard or felt a shadow presence. I opened my eyes. Silhouetted in my doorway stood a boy, all shoulders and nervous hands, standing awkward and shy as if he wasn’t used to his body. This wasn’t the graceful self-possessed Kolya I remembered.

“Come in,” I said. He edged his way forwards. I tried to smile. It felt forced. “Sit down.” He balanced himself on the edge of the bed, facing me. I looked into his face and it was still Kolya looking out, still the boy in the photographs, but he seemed so different, his dark eyes staring out from some other frame. He’d grown of course, not much, but enough to be clearly a teenager now, no longer the little forest faun of two years before. He was taking me in as well, seeing perhaps that I too was a mere mortal after all, and not the demi-god of his imagination.

In the days that followed Kolya hung around me as he had before, and we became accustomed to each other again, but for both of us it was a new person we had to get to know. Instead of a princely hero he had to deal with a moody man, far from perfect, often distracted by the work I’d brought with me, and short-tempered. I discovered not the charming youth I’d been remembering all this time, but a disappointingly unruly, sullen boy, a doggedly disobedient teenager who showed only the briefest flashes of the good nature that I remembered. I spent that first week wondering what I was doing there, why I had spent all the time and money. The school teacher summed him up.

“Kolya is a problem,” she told me one day. “He’s so bright, and he’s just throwing it away. He seems determined to fail. For the last year he’s been truant most of the time. He keeps running away. He was gone in the forest for three days once. We can never find him. And he doesn’t look after himself any more. He’s become dirty, lazy, and he doesn’t seem to care. About anything.”

This upset me, the more so since I couldn’t deny it. There he was daily in front of me, dirty, unkempt, aggressively sullen. I asked him about school when he was visiting me at the guest house one day. He flashed back at me, surly and abrupt.

“In a few weeks it’s finished anyway,” he muttered. “I don’t need any of that classroom hak*. I’m going hunting after this.” [* Yakut slang for excrement.]

“And New Zealand?” I said, rather hopelessly.

“So what?” he mumbled. He looked up at me and for a moment I saw the original Kolya way back there inside his eyes. “I suppose it’ll be interesting,” he conceded. I was lost for any decent response. I sat and watched him in silence. Eventually he got up to leave. “You were better in the letters,” he said. I leapt to my feet with sudden anger clogging my throat.

“So were you, Kolya,” I found myself yelling. “But this is the real me. And I thought you were better too. I thought you were intelligent, and studious, and gentle. Not … not … this,” I said, waving my arms at him, exasperated, myself also unable to come to terms with the real person and his real problems. He walked away in a huff.

Later, though, he came back, meek with conciliation, and asked if he could move from the school to stay with me in the guest house. It was four weeks before we would leave for New Zealand. I said he could stay with me if he promised to study every day for his exams. He laughed then.

“Okay,” he said, and moved in.

As good as his word, he studied each evening then, bent over his books on the table by the guest house bed. In the third week he sat his exams. He was jubilant when the results were posted. I was proud. He had passed in every subject. He came in from the school smugly to tell me this news, and I whooped with joy, hugged him tight and whirled him around in the air. Kolya shrieked with surprise at my reaction.

“You really are pleased, aren’t you?” he gasped when I put him down. He was grinning now too, all over his face. “Really?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. He blushed, turned away from me, and started fiddling with some papers on the table.

“I’ve told the school that I’ll come back in September,” he mumbled. “For the extra two years.”

“I’m glad about that,” I said. “I think of all the kids here you’re the one who really should continue with school.”

He turned back to me and shrugged. “Well … I have to if I’m going to go on to University,” he said.

We celebrated this victory with the imported luxuries of chocolate and walnuts, and drinks of apple syrup, all of which I had wrangled from the village canteen. We were celebrating of course, not just his exam success … in fact really not that at all … but his change of attitude, his acceptance of his own abilities, and his decision to make the most of them even if it made him different from everyone else that he knew.

Weeks later, in Moscow, we went shopping for books which he could bring to New Zealand so that he would have Russian reading material to entertain himself. We had decided he’d need about five novels. But Kolya loves to read. He couldn’t decide on five. In the end he bought fifteen, and three of them were books of poetry.

He still sits up in bed at night, reciting them to himself aloud. It is very important, he tells me earnestly, to ’speak’ poetry aloud. He loves the sound of the words. I knew then that he may be a wolf-hunter by birth and culture, but he’s a poet by nature. And now he had accepted it in himself.

When Kolya had moved in with me at the guest house we’d had four weeks before leaving for New Zealand, and I had spent that time reaching deeper and deeper into him, trying to draw out these things I was sure he contained. The study, the ensuing exam success, and his acceptance of his own academic ability, was a major victory, but there were other victories, less dramatic, but in some ways far more important.

Kolya was a very undisciplined boy. I had difficulty realising this and understanding why it was so. It seemed so easy to offer him love and encouragement. I knew that what he had lacked, and thus what he needed, was parental love. When I saw how unruly he was, how wild, how aggressively independent of control, I couldn’t understand it. Then I realised that he’d not only missed parental love, but parental control as well. He had never learned what discipline was. If I was going to parent him, it was not enough to give him love, for that was not all that he’d lacked. I had to be tough as well. I had to draw his boundaries for him. This was very difficult for both of us. He hated it, kicked and struggled against it, refused to acquiesce. I hated it too.

Every time he turned on me I convinced myself I had gone too far, had destroyed what was between us, had made him hate me. It wasn’t true, of course. Underneath the wild rages, he wanted the controls. We argued about everything. He always gave in. He always came back.

In the guest house I made him wash every morning. He didn’t want to. So the first morning I scrubbed him myself from head to foot, scouring from him all the accumulated dirt of the last twelve months. He let me do this, and looked at his clean feet afterwards.

“My nails are still dirty,” he said.

I told him to wear clean underclothes every day. He refused. He’d never worn them before. In fact he didn’t own any.

“It’s stupid,” he said. “Why wear clothes under your clothes? They just get dirty too.” Perhaps he’s right about that, but a few days later he started borrowing mine.

I said he had to get to bed by ten, to read and sleep. For two nights he disappeared until the small hours. I thought I had lost him. But on the third night he sheepishly got into bed at the unaccustomed time.

“I can’t sleep this early,” he said after a long time.

“Try,” I said. He threw himself on his tummy and disappeared under the bedding, deliberately over-playing it like a brat, lying aggressively still. After a few more minutes I heard his voice mumble out from under the bedding, slightly coy, slightly embarrassed. I pulled back the cover. He looked up at me in the half-light.

“Maybe I can,” he whispered uncertainly,”… if you stay with me.” Without a word, I flopped onto the bed beside him, put my arm around him. He shifted into me and relaxed, cuddled warm against me, one eye peeking out. “Promise you won’t go away until I’m asleep,” he breathed.

“I won’t,” I assured him. Lying there beside him, with him, I found myself bending my head to his, brushing his hair with my lips. I finally whispered to him what I knew. “I love you, Kolya.”

There was an eternity of silence. He was breathing softly. “I know,” he said at last. And I saw the wetness well up in his eyes, his lips trembling uncertainly. “I love you too,” he managed, shaky-voiced. A first single teardrop spilled over onto his cheek, ran down alone across his face. I brushed it aside for him, my fingers like feathers. Other soft tears followed, gentle rivulets on his cheeks. They were not of sadness but of relief, of some deep aching ecstasy at last released. They were his tears of coming home. I held him tighter. “You tell nobody,” he whispered. “I never cry. I never cry. Only for you.”

Here, in New Zealand, all this change has become routine.

Now he disappears every morning into the bathroom for an hour and comes out shining and creamy clean. He’s been shopping and bought himself a whole wardrobe of underwear and sox, not to mention a panoply of new outer clothing to replace at last the government-issue drabs he’s worn all his life. He makes the bed. He washes the dishes. He vacuums the apartment. One day he cleaned the windows.

And gloriously … for I love this in him … he remains somehow wild and free within these boundaries. In his Levi’s and sweatshirt, sporting his Nike sneakers, and as bright as a pin, he’s still exuberant with inner joy, eyes sparkling with the spirit of the wolf-hunter and the freedom of his native arctic forest. He’s not changed, thank God, just blossomed.

I’m impressed by how quickly he has managed all this. He’s fast-tracked himself in a matter of weeks, from baby through childhood to teenager. We have done it together, really. I use my intellect to try to work out what he needs. Kolya just uses his instinct and tells me. There are times when he needs to be a baby, and times when he needs to be a youth. He lets me know about this, expressing his feelings more easily than I could. If he wants to be cuddled, I cuddle him. It’s a stage he has not previously been through and he needs it.

One day here he sat and stared at his dinner without touching it. He kept flicking his eyes at me, grinning, a little embarrassed. Eventually he spoke.

“Would you feed me?” he said. I must have looked mystified. “Like a baby?” I did. He shut his eyes, opened his mouth wide, and for that one moment in his life retreated back to a missed experience.

But he flicks around in age as he needs to. On another day, he suddenly wanted teenage advice. “What’s a condom like?” he asked me.

“Boring, but a good idea,” I said. We talked about that, and ultimately about girls, sex, and even AIDS. Later he shifted again. He wanted me to cut his nails, and lay across me like an indolent eight-year-old, as if girls and sex were unimagined yet, still years ahead.

I have fast-tracked myself too. It’s not just responses to his needs, not just a pretence in me that he is this age or that age, allowing him to experience the different stages of a missed childhood. I too am automatically and genuinely experiencing all those different stages of parenting. I’m doing it unwittingly, answering an inner need too, I guess, as Kolya is.

I came in one morning to wake him up. He was sprawled across the bed, the duvet crumpled and crushed over him in a teenage tangle. One foot hung out from the cover. I stood there not waking him but looking with some strange inner pleasure at how clean his foot was now, every toe, every nail, pristine and pearly. Before I could stop myself I was admiring this foot not for its cleanliness so much as simply for its existence, admiring it with the kind of wondrous awe that you feel for a newborn baby’s bits.

When I suddenly realised this, my immediate reaction was to stop myself from such ridiculous indulgence. But I didn’t stop. I sat down and absorbed myself in Kolya’s reality for that magic moment. Why not? I need to go through these stages too.

The worst of them has been the parental paranoia, a new emotion I have found within myself. It’s the terror that something terrible has happened to him when he’s on his own. It took a while to come to this, because at first Kolya clung to me as a refuge against the impact of the alien world he was moving in. But eventually he needed to face it alone. The first time he took off on his own I was nervous. He went into the city for a wander. After a couple of hours I was terrified. By six in the evening with no sign of his return I was convinced that he was kidnapped or dead. The telephone kept beckoning me … but who could I call? The police? The city hospital? The Soviet Embassy?

My neighbour sat with me for an hour, calming me as the night closed in and a storm began brewing outside, and in the midst of my terror and the torrential sub-tropical downpour, Kolya suddenly wandered in, drenched to the skin, and completely unaware of what I’d been through. I tried to bottle up the burst of bitter comments that rose in my throat, glad at least that it was a natural paranoia which only I had been feeling. He sat in a hot bath later, soaking himself after getting so wet, and looked up at me, seeing I suppose some of the relief in my face.

“I guess this was a kind of exam,” he said, grinning.

“You passed,” I told him.

Kolya has now discovered the wider world he craved.

From the moment we left his village and flew south he has made discoveries. In the plane he stared transfixed at the clouds, seeing them from above. In Irkutsk City, the capital of his province, he discovered cars, streets, people, buildings and bathrooms. Driving in from the airport, he stared goggle-eyed out of the taxi window at everything, coloured lights to control the traffic, buildings of stone and cement, shops, pedestrians.

In the hotel bedroom he stood up on the wide window sill and paced to and fro like a caged animal, watching the street six floors below him. He couldn’t believe he was inside a building and so high up that he could look down on the tops of people and cars, so tiny below. Later he disappeared into the en suite bathroom and played with the taps and the toilet flusher for half an hour.

“What amazing technology,” he said when he finally tore himself away and emerged into the bedroom. In the morning I showed him the shower. He was cautious about it at first, but afterwards he wouldn’t let me turn it off. It seemed magic to him, streaming hot water from above.

We spent five days in Moscow because I wanted him to have the opportunity of seeing his own culture and his own country as well as mine. We visited the Kremlin, Red Square, the shops in Gorky Street, the Moscow Circus. But it finally became too much for him. On the third day he refused to go out.

“There are too many people and cars,” he explained. “I just want to stay in the room.” He did so for two days before he ventured into the streets again.

“I know it’s unusual for you,” I said. “So many people. Nakanno is only two hundred.”

“It’s not just how many,” Kolya said. “It’s that I don’t know them.”

“Of course,” I said.

“No,” he said. “You don’t understand. I don’t know them. Who are they? What are their names? Where do they live?. Who are they? Do they have kids? I don’t know. It’s very weird seeing all these humans and I don’t know them. All my life … all my life … I never saw anyone I didn’t already know. But here … they’re like insects. Millions of insects. Not like people at all. Not real. I don’t like that. I don’t understand it. It makes me ill.”

At first things were little different in New Zealand. And here he’s also had to come to terms with a certain amount of public notoriety. As if it were not enough to be thrust into the rôle of son, to deal with that emotional trauma, and as well have to cope with the culture shock of an alien environment, he has also necessarily had to deal with the limelight of minor fame.

Television has sought him out. The newspapers have photographed him and interviewed him. Radio stations have chatted to him through my Russian. And countless people have written and telephoned him from all over the country. He’s been stopped in shops and supermarkets by people who wanted to meet him. He’s been flooded with the pressure of gifts and invitations from strangers. And he’s been cornered into an incessant round of official visits and functions.

We’ve avoided an awful lot of this. That’s sad, because it’s all well-meant, all genuine kindness. Those people we have responded to have invariably showered Kolya with real affection, good experiences, and often with more gifts than he dreamed of … the use of a holiday house on a Pacific Ocean beach, an official NZ All Blacks rugby football training suit, fishing trips in the gulf, a glittery night in a tuxedo, it goes on and on. But the sheer volume of invitations has been at times too much for him to cope with. Yet he has. Kolya’s ability to understand himself, and pace himself, and deal with things when and as he needs to, always amazes me.

He has an animal-like habit of physically checking his environment all the time. Whenever we arrive in a new place, whether it’s a shop, a motel room, or just a friend’s house, Kolya will wander about for the first five minutes, touching everything, investigating everything, trying everything.

He’s remarkably observant too. The first time he went alone into the central city he told me he’d walked over to the Victoria Park Markets. We had been there only once at that time, and by car.

“How did you find your way there?” I asked him.

“I just walked west,” he said, “until I saw the radio station billboard.” I didn’t even know there was one, but Kolya constantly brands every place he goes with memorised landmarks which he seems to call up at will.

His memory is excellent, and always leaves me speechless. At glow-worm caves in the south we fell across a display of moa bird bones in the museum upstairs. I started to explain what they were. Kolya stopped me.

“It’s an extinct giant bird,” he said. “I know about this. It didn’t fly. I read about it once in a story about the Pacific Ocean.” Now at last I have given up trying to teach him everything … I just let him experience it.

His sense of direction is impeccable. In fact it’s become a bit of a party trick. As a demonstration to others, I often ask him where some part of the city is. He always points towards it, wherever we are, and gets it dead right. We got lost one night, driving through the back streets a long way from home. Kolya got us out of the endless wandering. Wherever we were he could point out the car window and tell me where the centre of the city was. It was like having a human compass in the passenger seat.

If you dropped me in the Siberian forest, out of sight of his village, I’d be instantly lost. The trees all look the same.

“That’s ridiculous,” Kolya told me when I said this to him. “The trees are different, every one.”

Still, I’d be lost in the forest there. And a few weeks’ experience wouldn’t help me. Yet in the same few weeks here in my forest of steel and glass, Kolya has conquered the place. When he first arrived he would as soon stay in my car as shove through the people on the pavements. He really couldn’t deal with the traffic, the crowds, the never-ending shops. Now, it’s nothing for him to take the harbor ferry across to the city, go window shopping for hours, buy himself lunch, and wander home when it suits him.

In the first few weeks he treated my apartment and my car as safe refuges from the rush of foreign experiences, always retreating to them as he was overwhelmed. He would be brain dead from new input every evening, and crash like a log until late the next morning. Now he feels free to come and go as he wishes, certain of himself and safe. He might have been born here.

Whatever it is he has learnt in his arctic homeland, it serves him well. His attitudes to life, his abilities, his direct honesty about himself and others, all contribute to helping him survive. And it works as well in my society as in his. What I have found is that his abilities are universal, useful anywhere, while the things I learned in my life, in my culture, are less so. I could not survive his homeland. Kolya, I think, could survive anywhere. It’s because the skills I have learned are outside of myself, technological skills only, while Kolya has instead learned human skills, inner abilities which I can only call wisdom. At least they are skills that have to do with his own body and with the planet, rather than with technology.

But Kolya has changed in two ways.

The morose and rather bitter boy I re-discovered in Siberia three months ago has gone, replaced at last by the natural vibrancy of his youth. He has touched at last his own childhood and found his own inner strength. He’s whole now in that sense, and radiant with it. I still have the picture of him there in my mind … grim and serious, disappointed with his life and who he was, throwing away his potential, touchy and argumentative. He hadn’t been able to be a child.

Now I see him cavorting around the apartment, or jubilant with new teenage friends, laughing and playing games, being the kid he had never allowed himself to be before.

And of course he has touched too all the experiences he has spent his life reading about, all the things his mind and body have hungered for. We have done so much here, ordinary things that we’ve enjoyed together, and special things which have been gifted to him by others. He’s seen much of this country, the cities, the farmlands, the mountains, forests, and the ocean.

The ocean fascinated him. He stood on a west coast beach on his second day in the country, and stared out towards Africa, trying to imagine how far the water went, trying to contain its enormity in his consciousness.

“It’s the New Zealand taiga,” he finally said, using his own name for the endless Siberian forest. “All around you and everywhere. Yes, it’s like that. Loren, you said you never saw snow until you were fifteen.” That had seemed incredible to him at the time. “But now I’ve seen the ocean. It’s the same thing.” Happy with the concept, he started picking up sea shells. He has since made a collection of them to take back, forever fascinated by them, strange remnants of an alien place.

He finally swam in the ocean, at a beach on the Pacific, leaping about as if it were a summer day, splashing in the surf, diving beneath it. He was experiencing salt water and waves for the first time. The weather didn’t bother him of course. Kolya thinks it’s absurd to call this winter, with temperatures above zero and sunshine streaming down. All the time we are in my car he runs the air-conditioning, chilling down the car until it feels right to him. Without it, he says, the car is far too hot. I just wear sweaters and let him be comfortable.

He’s touched other cultures too.

The capitalist culture of consumerism … on a visit to a city school he was asked what he thought of all the shops and cars.

“Fantastic,” he said. “There is so much of everything.” And then added: “Maybe too much.”

The Polynesian culture of the South Pacific that New Zealand is so steeped in. He was welcomed by the Maori classes of the Technical Institute some weeks ago. There was a lot of music and song, a lot of oratory, a lot of food, a lot of kissing, hugging, and ceremonial pressing of noses.

“I’ve never been kissed so much,” he whispered to me in the middle of all this. “But I like these people. They’re the same as me.” He treasures now the sacred bone-carved pendant and other Maori gifts that he’s been given.

The European society of middle-class New Zealand … he was asked another time if he believed in God.

“No,” he laughed. “But I believe in spirits … power … ” and then he thought of the analogy he wanted, drawn from a very recent experience … “like the Force in Star Wars.”

He had seen Star Wars on a video one night at the apartment. I wanted him to see movies, but was troubled about how to arrange it, language being the major problem. We went to two Russian films which were on in a current Film Festival. After that I rented videos of various movies that I knew did not rely on language for their story … Quest For Fire, Clan of the Cave Bear, A Man Called Horse, that sort of thing. Finally I decided to try Star Wars with its relatively simple story, visual comedy, and high action.

Kolya was riveted. He has since seen all three of these films, and the threesome of Indiana Jones movies too. He’s made a collection of Star Wars gadgetry, books and posters. Space age action is a kind of universal teenage language, I guess. And now his English is good enough anyway to cope with most that he sees. He watches television a great deal, loving the commercials which are repetitive enough for him to understand and follow. Like tiny movies.

Music too, is another universal teenage tongue. He arrived here with a bunch of music cassettes we bought in Moscow, collections of Soviet rock with which he could entertain himself while here. I thought he’d like some Western rock as well, and one day at a gas station I told him we could buy a few cassettes. In the first few seconds he grabbed a Guns’n'Roses album. Some teenage instinct tells him this is what to listen to. But his biggest musical thrill has been a gift … a double album compilation of top Western artists given to him by Greenpeace, complete with an explanatory book about the music and the bands, written in Russian. As something of an international coup, Greenpeace have released this album first in the USSR … and Kolya knows only too well that when he gets back he’ll be the first kid in Siberia with a copy of it. I can feel him waiting to be smug over that.

Yet despite the changes he remains Kolya. It’s a fascinating paradox in some ways. He has learned the ways of the West so fast, and assimilated so many of them, that he seems almost a child of the Pacific himself now. Yet inside it all he is still the Yakut boy. Perhaps to say he’s changed is wrong. He’s expanded, rather. I think he has blossomed into what he wanted to become. Inside the added experiences and the greater knowledge he is still the Siberian native.

One morning in the middle of the country he woke up in a motel room and announced that he was missing the snow. This theme continued through the morning. I realised he was feeling a little homesick. We headed for the mountains that are central to the island, drove and chair-lifted our way as high as we could, and Kolya spent hours engrossed in an environment he understood … though he said he found it quite hot.

Another day, faced with his Western breakfast of cereal and fresh fruit, he started hanging out instead for a treat from his homeland … frozen raw elk liver. It took me a week to get hold of the nearest thing I could find, fresh deer liver from a specialist butcher. We threw it in the freezer, and later for a few moments Kolya disappeared into a reverie of nostalgia, chomping on this bloody treat.

He wandered with me through a wildlife park somewhere one afternoon, seeing trout, deer, Australian wallabies, native hawks, and kiwis, the small flightless bird that is the symbol of New Zealand. He kept wanting to kill something to eat. I had told him he couldn’t.

“But there are so many animals in New Zealand,” he said. “And birds. There are millions. Why not eat them?”

To Kolya the idea of pet animals, or animals just to look at, seems crazy. They either work for you, he says, or you eat them. He has had to learn that they can also be pets, though he still jokingly takes imaginary aim at them all, playing the game of hunting them. But he has understood that we don’t need to hunt to survive.

The food here has astounded him. His first day in a supermarket he was shocked into silence by the sheer scale of the place, and the diversity of its product. In Siberia I had asked him his favourite foods, wanting some idea of what kind of things to buy.

“Elk and fish,” he said with confidence. It was, of course, pretty much all he had ever eaten. I started suggesting things, carrots, cabbage, nuts, fruit. He regarded most of them as unattainable luxuries.

“Beans?” I said.

“What are they?” he came back.

“How about treats?” I asked. “Ice cream?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never had it.”

In New Zealand he has tried it all. He most loves chicken, salami, vegetables, and salad. And he cannot stop eating fresh fruit. Nor drinking juice. Interestingly he instinctively shies away from commercial drinks, preferring fresh fruit juice, though he’ll drink Coca Cola if no fresh juice is available. He’s tried fast foods as well, but they have left him cold.

Kolya’s general health, eyesight, and teeth have all been checked while he’s been here, with visits to my doctor, optician, and dentist. Everything is perfect. The dentist was drooling.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said, staring incredulously into the pink cavern of Kolya’s mouth, ringed with strong, white, and perfect teeth. “This boy should be used as a demonstration.” And Kolya has never had dental treatment in his life. The same’s true of his health in general.

“He’s as fit as an ox,” my doctor said. He’s strong too. Despite the small stature he inherits from his Yakut origins, and the slimness of build, Kolya’s skinny arms and legs are tiny powerhouses. He has got into endless wrestling play with a nephew of mine at various times. Russel is the same age as Kolya, but over six feet tall, an enormously big boy who lifts weights and does other such macho stuff. He cannot better the minuscule tough Yakut.

“Have you seen Superstars of Wrestling on tv?” one boy asked Kolya on one of the school visits he has done.

“Yes,” Kolya said. “But it’s just make-believe.” The boy looked glum. Some of the older boys laughed. “That’s OK,” Kolya reassured him. “This is a make-believe country.”

Shopping here has been one of the major activities … often not so much to buy things, but to see them. His major lesson from the shopping has been the lesson of choice. The first day he was here we went out looking for new clothes. I showed him a pair of shoes on the shelf.

“They’re the wrong size,” he said. I tried to explain that the shop would have other sizes available. “OK, then,” he agreed. “Let’s get this type.” But I could tell he wasn’t convinced.

“If you don’t like them, say so,” I said.

“But I need shoes,” he answered. It took me a while to realise that Kolya had no idea there was further choice, that if he didn’t like what he first saw we could find something else, in another shop, at another time. Such choice was something he had never experienced and never understood.

He’s not a greedy or exploitative boy by nature, and happily the plethora of all this consumerism has not essentially changed him. Now he understands it, and has even made joyous use of it, slowly gathering for himself the things he feels he needs or wants. But he’s learned to use the choice that’s available sensibly, I think. He window-shops a lot, often on his own, remembering the things he has seen and telling me about them afterwards. We keep a list of possibilities, and leave actual purchasing until later.

My own thumbnail analysis of modern Soviet society is that it is taking place in a kind of time warp. There are many things that can be said about the USSR today, leaving politics aside. Too many opinions, perhaps, too many views. I have found the quickest way to understand any or all of them is to imagine that the Soviet Union is still trapped in the 50s. It may be about to move forwards quite fast … I believe it is and it will … but nevertheless you will click about that place and what it’s like if you can remember the early 50s.

To some extent dealing with Kolya is like dealing with a boy from 40 years ago, with all the attitudes of that time, the conservatism in some ways, the lack of being accustomed to privilege and product, the awe at anything remotely ‘modern’.

In this sense what has happened to Kolya is a time-shift. He has projected himself suddenly into the 1990s, and he’ll go back to his homeland in central Siberia like a time traveller returning with tales in his mind of what life will one day be like, and examples in his luggage of the glories and trappings of the future.

In my early twenties I worked in New Zealand as a journalist on a provincial newspaper. One of the great maxims I learned at that time about newspapers and the news in general was that yesterday’s paper was never more than fish’n'chip wrap. The public’s appetite for news is one of the most mercurial of things, transient, fickle and evanescent, read today, garbage tomorrow.

I have been delighted to learn that there are times when this is not true.

In May this year, in an arctic Siberian village, I wrote down the story of how I met Kolya. In June the Sunday Star Times published the story. In July I was back in New Zealand, flooded with more mail than I have ever imagined receiving. Even now, late in August, letters still arrive. Somehow, people were moved by that story, perhaps by its simplicity, perhaps by the fascination of its cross-cultural exchange. But I think mostly because it touched on a kind of loving which has rarely been exposed before … the deeply intense love which a man is capable of feeling, but rarely expresses, for a child.

Most of the letters were from men. I think the story of my meeting Kolya, of his desperation for a father-figure, of his needing to be loved, and of my accepting that role in his life, reached and touched unfathomed depths in many other men. One person read it and described it as “the love story of the nineties”, dealing as it does with this area of relationship scarcely examined until now. We are too afraid of love in our culture, and especially when it exists as powerfully as it can between a man and a boy. But we confuse love with libido. And we give ourselves no credit for knowing there’s a difference.

I’m glad it has touched these chords. I felt this story had something to say to all of us. I’d thought it was about social values, about international understanding, about cultural exchange. It is, but it turns out to be also … and mostly … about loving. Of course that’s why I want to make the movie I mentioned in that story. I want Kolya’s story to be everyone’s to share. I want people all over this planet to know that it’s possible to love instead of to doubt, or suspect, or hate, regardless of social, cultural, or even political differences. I want everyone to know that what matters is to touch each other, to give to each other, and to learn from each other.

We need that on this planet.

Kolya and I have found in each other the things we both needed the most, and we have given them freely. It seems to me that if the rest of us can loosen up, can release ourselves from the veneer of materialism, can liberate ourselves from the constraints of a contrived morality, and touch each other simply as humans, according to our human needs, the planet may be worth living on.

I cannot make that happen. Even if I make my movie, and millions of people learn this story, I cannot guarantee it will change the world. Stories and movies rarely do. At best they plant seeds.

The seed of the story I wrote in Siberia has flourished. That’s heartening. And people have asked for more. I’m pleased. Perhaps it can, after all, blossom into the movie I am writing. But it’s harder than you think to write more … the sequel to my meeting Kolya again after eighteen months doesn’t fall out of my brain easily. It isn’t a simple train of events, one after the other. It’s a tortuous passage instead, wandering through all my emotions, overwhelming Kolya, tearing us apart, stitching us together, turning us every way, demanding things from me I have never considered before.

In the end, real life is not at all like the story you would write of it if you had the chance. Writing fiction is so much more satisfying. You can make of the characters what you want. You can have them do what you need for the story. You can engineer events to your heart’s content. As long as everything is logical, and everyone’s motives make credible sense of their actions, you can slot together a wonderful fiction like a jigsaw puzzle, a neatly-packaged mosaic complex in which everything fits and everything is resolved. Nice square edges once you’ve got it all together. I do this for a living.

But life itself is not so tidy. A jigsaw as well it may be, but an eternally ragged one, for which we will never see the overall picture, a puzzle with most of the pieces always missing, always ahead of us, scattered and misunderstood on an endless table.

So I don’t know if this story has a happy ending or not. If I was writing it as fiction I would give it a happy ending, though one achieved only after conflict … that always makes the best stories. But it’s not fiction I am writing here. It’s my life, and Kolya’s life, and we are still living it. Mind you, there is plenty of conflict. It is not all sweetness and light. We have both had a tough time of it, both had much to learn … about each other, about parenting and being parented, and about the fine distinction between the passions of love and hate, when you care too much. Nor have we had much time in which to learn all this. A few precious weeks. Our one shot at being, for each other, who we wanted to be.

But I think, just now, we are winning. Because it is real life, it has no ending in sight at this time. But as much as it’s possible to see, I think we at least have a happy beginning here now. Kolya has expanded as he wanted to. He has learned some of what he wanted, mostly about himself. And he has gained immeasurably in strength, from knowing as he now does that he is valued, respected, and loved.

When I look at the boy running around Rainbow’s End with his friends from the college it amazes me that this is the same boy who eleven weeks ago had never seen a water tap. Now he has sailed a yacht, driven a motor car, learned to play billiards, become expert at the games in video arcades. Now he speaks English, simply but with confidence, he watches videos, operates my apartment by all its remote controls, shops in supermarkets, uses the telephone with ease. Now he listens to rock’n'roll favourites on his Walkman stereo … he likes Guns’n'Roses along with every other 14-year-old in the Western world … he watches television, goes to the movies, eats at a table with a knife and fork … or even chopsticks … handles restaurants with practised ease.

Weeks ago he was adamant that this was a one-off experience, a chance to spend the time with me that he wanted, and a chance to see and experience the wider world that had been a fascinating mystery to him before. When it was over, he said, he would go back content.

Now he sits up in bed, sipping a morning cup of coffee, and wonders about going back. He wants to, of course. The last two weeks he has almost been counting the days. But now:

“I wonder how I will live there,” he says. “Without all this. The coffee, the heating. All this stuff.”

He won’t.

He is moving now, to a larger town, to the only real town in his entire county. It’s called Erbogachën. In Katanga County, a region larger than California, there are only 8000 people. Most live scattered across this vast wilderness in tiny remote villages like the arctic one from which Kolya has come. Erbogachën is the only place there of any size at all. It has 3000 people in it. It’s still a log cabin town, still without roads connecting it to the world. But it does have a proper airfield, a little power station, a hospital, a few shops, a few motor vehicles, and a High School with the classes for the last two years that Kolya now needs. This is where we are returning to.

And at last Kolya will not live at the school. He’s sick of that. We are finding him a private room in the town, a place of his own. And he will set it up as he wants. He went shopping the other day for just that purpose. He is flying back to the arctic now with as much of the comfort of this other world as he can carry … an electric blanket, a torch, a kettle, toiletries, music, warm clothes, toothbrush, towels, fishing and hunting tackle, and a year’s supply of vitamins to replace the improved diet he has become accustomed to here.

He’ll also take back the memories and the love. Where a few weeks ago he imagined that this experience was great but would soon be history, now he speaks of his friends in New Zealand with a real affection that will not be relegated to the past. It has also to be in the future.

“I’ll see you next time,” he says, hugging the people he has met, farewelling them now but knowing it will not be forever.

These two articles were originally written and published in 1990. Now, in 2004, Kolya is 28, and married. He has not yet returned to New Zealand, though he has considered doing so, but he and Loren have had further holidays together in Russia and eastern Europe. Kolya has also spent some years living and working in Irkutsk City in central Siberia, but he and his young wife lately returned to his home village in the arctic north, where he hunts and fishes, and writes poetry.

In 1987 New Zealander Loren Robb, independent film and television producer and director, spent weeks with a television crew in a Siberian village near the Arctic Circle. They were videotaping the final episode of a documentary chronicling family life across the spectrum of what was then the USSR. His encounter with a native arctic boy, Kolya, gave rise to an inspiring story of affection and caring between two people, in particular a man and a boy, as well as a coming-of-age experience for both of them.Recently published as a two-part article in NAMBLA’s Bulletin, ‘Kolya’ is Loren’s articulate, insightful, sensitive and intelligent account of how love is what matters above all else. The story received nothing but praise from those who were moved to send in letters. It received the same overwhelmingly positive response from general readers when it was first published in a number of New Zealand newspapers in 1990. Loren doesn’t just convey a story, he recreates an experience.Although a planned collaboration between the West and Moscow to produce a movie based on the story of Loren and Kolya fell through after the collapse of the USSR in 1992, today there’s renewed interest in the project. If the movie version — titled The Yakut Lesson — is produced, it will become one of the very few mainstream movies to have a love relationship between a man and a boy as its central theme, and may be the first movie to ever blatantly challenge the Western world’s paranoia about such love. There are clear hints of Loren’s views on that subject in his original articles about meeting and loving Kolya. It is now my privilege to present a more detailed interview I conducted much more recently with him.

Part Three: the Interview

Bulletin Let me start by reiterating how heartwarming it was to read how you and Kolya nurtured each other emotionally and spiritually. Would you care to elaborate on your background, as well as Kolya’s, in order to give our readers a better perspective on the events that led up to this relationship?

Loren I don’t think there’s much elaboration I could give that isn’t already touched on in the two articles.

On the one hand we have a boy who felt unwanted and dispossessed, who had been removed from his family when he was five because of a history of physical abuse, who had grown up emotionally alone and hurt since then, and who had just turned 13 and was desperate to belong to someone, to just be loved, and who, now on the journey to becoming a man himself, wanted to have a man as a role model. It’s difficult to say why he chose me to fill those roles. I think Kolya felt like an outcast in the village — it was an Evenki village anyway, and he was a Yakut boy, which would have heightened his sense of separation — and I think he saw me as an outsider too and identified strongly with that.

On the other hand we have a man whose marriage had recently collapsed, whose dreams of creating a family had evaporated, whose desire to love and nurture a child had been thwarted. It’s no surprise that I responded so positively to Kolya’s need, because it was the exact mirror to mine.

But there was something else going on, I know. There’s that indefinable element people call ‘chemistry’, where there seems to be an almost pre-existing bond between two people. Certainly Kolya and I were both instantly riveted by each other from the very second we met, and it has to be for that ineffable reason nobody can ever explain. To me it was as if I ‘recognised’ him the moment I saw him and I was overwhelmed by the notion that my even being in Siberia was primarily to meet him. I think Kolya felt some sense of destiny like that too — he used to say that we were each only half of a single being, and that we’d both been incomplete until we met.

Bulletin This is undeniably a story about parental love. Those roles between you and Kolya are clear. But because it appears in the NAMBLA Bulletin, does that imply it’s also about boylove?

Loren Well … it was the Bulletin who asked me if they could publish these articles, not me who submitted them. I wasn’t hanging out to be published in a boylove magazine. But I agreed because Kolya’s and my relationship was, at least in semantics, boylove, in that he was a boy and I loved him. What else is boylove but loving a boy, for whatever reason, and in whatever manner? That makes the story relevant to NAMBLA and Bulletin readers, doesn’t it? I thought it did.

But in saying that, I guess I’m not really addressing your unspoken question, am I? What you’re really asking is what the particular aspects of that love were. Was it love at all? Do we call it parental love? What other aspects of love were a part of it? I can answer some of that. First of all, yes, it’s a love story. However you determine love, that’s undeniably clear. And, yes, parental love is patently one strong aspect of that. There was also an incredibly strong direct love as well — the chemistry thing I mentioned before. There’s no doubt that quite apart from Kolya’s need to be parented and my need to be a parent, he and I loved each other very much anyway. We might call that affective or emotional love. There’s no doubt Kolya and I loved each other that way too, and with enormous power — to put it simply, we didn’t just love each other, we fell in love with each other. That leaves only physical love, which runs the gamut all the way from an affectionate hug to the full sexual expression of a strong mutual bond. But beyond the fact that Kolya and I certainly hugged each other and had a very natural physical bond, it’s impossible for me to comment, because to do so doesn’t work, whatever I say. If I tell you my physical relationship with Kolya was NOT sexual, few of your readers will believe me, I suspect, and it could invalidate for them much of what I might yet say in this interview. On the other hand, if I say it WAS sexual, then I’d incriminate myself in some territories where such things break the local law, and worse, I’d be implying things about Kolya — and other boys I’ve known — that I’d have no right to imply without their permission.

I’m comfortable just to let your readers assume what they will.

Bulletin I’m intrigued by your plans to make The Yakut Lesson as a fictional movie, despite its being based on your real experiences with Kolya. In fictionalising the true story, have you allowed the movie script to deal with aspects of love that you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to touch on? If so, could you share with us which aspects of that love the script portrays and how you have portrayed them?

Loren I suppose you mean the physical or sexual aspects. You’re right, of course, that the movie could deal a lot more openly with something like the sexual expression of love between a man and boy than it could get away with if it was promoted as a true story. However, oddly, that’s not the reason I fictionalised the story.

It’s much more mundane and workaday. The fact is the real life story provides no cinematic ending, no great denouement where the audience goes “Omigod” before the curtain falls. Real lives tend not to be cinematically structured. They just roll on. So I came up with a more powerful ending, and in turn that demanded a different way to logically reach that ending. In effect, the twists and turns of the story are now not what actually took place. But all the details are real. So the real-life events are like a resource of true information that fleshes out the characters and events of a dramatic fictional tale.

You see, the first question you have to ask yourself when you’re creating a story of any kind is “what am I trying to say?”. You have to know what the story is about, what it’s intended to say to its audience. In this case I knew that I wanted to say a lot of things about human relationships … both at a grand level in the way we relate to each other as cultures and societies, and at a more intimate level in the way we relate to each other as individuals. I figured to use one as a mirror for the other. In general I think the West is really screwed up when it comes to relationships, whether with other cultures or just with other people. I wanted to write a story about a western man who comes face to face with that screwed-up attitude of his, and is forced to change it. In that way his story becomes an analogy for the audience of their whole western attitude and how misplaced it is.

The ‘lesson’ of the title appears in the story to be a two-way deal — the man and the boy both learn things from each other — but in the end the real lesson, the important one, is the lesson for the western man. He learns, as the boy puts it in the movie itself, to be a ‘person’. He learns to shed his preconceptions, his guilt, his shame, his fretful little western hang-ups.

In one of those articles about my experiences with Kolya, I said something like: “I want people to know that it’s possible to love instead of to doubt, or suspect, or hate, regardless of social, cultural, or even political differences. I want them to know that what matters is to touch each other simply as humans, to love each other according to our human needs, and if we can do that, the planet may be worth living on.” That’s what the movie’s about.

That lesson’s there in the story for any western audience with the wit to see it. That very idea is encapsulated in the tagline intended for marketing the movie: “The boy had nothing to give him … but the one gift he’d never had … himself”.

And if these two characters symbolise west and non-west, guilt and non-guilt, I ask myself what event between them would best symbolise the need for a change of attitude? The answer is obvious. Love.

In one fell swoop, love between a man and a boy strikes me as the single hardest thing for a western audience to accept, to be forced to acknowledge. Suddenly for me the story and its underlying message falls into place like that — if I can make this credible to an audience, and if they can accept it, then the story does its job, and maybe opens their minds a little to the possibility that such things are all right, laudable even, and not to be misinterpreted, or vilified, or covered with shame.

However … and it’s a big however … how far do we go?

I had to ask myself that too. We could have gone the whole way. I was sorely tempted to do so, like, “let’s really shock a few people here”. I have no problem with writing a movie in which the man and boy end up expressing their love sexually. I have no problem with depicting their love-making right there on screen, for that matter. I think For A Lost Solider is a beautiful film, and would be lacking its pivotal focus if it did not deliver that amazing scene upstairs where the soldier finally makes love to the boy … slowly, gently, and with overwhelming love. But For A Lost Solider was never a mainstream movie. So whatever message it has reaches only a very select audience, who are anyway certainly intelligent and broad-minded enough not to need the message in the first place. I wanted The Yakut Lesson to be mainstream, and to achieve that, we can’t have the characters become actual lovers. At least not on screen.

What I have done, however, is make that issue a focus nevertheless. We raise it head on and debunk it constantly. It’s never clear in the script, or on screen, whether or not this man and boy become physical lovers, but what is patently clear is that they have a very close physical relationship, and that their attitudes to that are markedly different. There’s an awful lot of intimacy in the movie … the village boys hold hands (which they really do, by the way), they bathe each other naked in the bath house, they are completely unabashed about nudity and sex. All these things are in the movie, and all of them upset the western man character because he constantly interprets them as sexual or weird. Eventually he — and the audience — learn that such things are neither weird nor necessarily sexual, but simply human. The first real intimacy between the man and boy is in the bath house, in fact, when the boy tells the man he wants to wash him. He persuades the man to undress completely, and when both of them are naked he proceeds to wash the man all over, very gently, very lovingly. The man is at first horrified at the very idea, and even when he allows it, is laughably tense. Finally, though, he relaxes, and enjoys the intimacy of being washed. The washing over, the boy kisses the man lightly on the forehead and whispers in his broken English, “Now you real, now you a person”.

The man has similar problems with each step in their growing intimacy. He is awkward embracing and comforting the boy when it’s obviously called for. He’s terribly embarrassed when the boy first wants to stay the night in his cabin. And so on. Over the over, the story raises the question of intimacy in the audience’s mind and demonstrates that it is irrelevant because what matters is that they love each other. Just that.

The script, deliberately of course, even makes fun of the western attitude, just as the boy would do anyway, since he finds it so laughable. Back in the west, there’s comment from a woman at a party about it — she says semi-jokingly at one point, “There’d better be a woman behind this, darling. Imagine what people will say otherwise. I mean he’s just so pretty”. Later also in the west, when the man comes out of the bathroom where he’s been washing the boy (it’s now their habit to wash each other), a friend says, astonished, “You WASH him?”, and the man just shrugs and says “It’s a cultural thing” … these scenes are played for laughs, but it’s apparent to the audience that the man has grown in attitude and humanity.

So, without consigning the movie to a minority arthouse audience by having openly sexual scenes between the man and the boy, I think the script nevertheless manages to acknowledge the deep love that exists between these two characters, and to force its audience to come to terms with that love, and to start to think that whether or not it includes sexual love is irrelevant. There’s no in-your-face fucking, to put it simply, but there’s a hell of lot of very charged physicality, and even, in that pivotal bath house scene and in other scenes, a lot of intimate nudity between these two.

So I hope that an audience, especially a western male audience, will be forced to consider the revolutionary notion that it’s love that matters, regardless of gender, regardless of age, sexual activity, or cultural background, regardless of how that love might or might not be expressed.

Just as my character finally takes off his clothes and allows the boy to wash him intimately, I am challenging the audience to take off their guilt and shame and allow themselves to love and be loved. As the boy puts it, he becomes ‘a person’ — and so can we all.

Bulletin ‘Love’ is one of those words that gets bandied about quite a bit, and thus made suspect. Besides referring to various conditions between persons, people also can have a love of activities, of material goods, and of ideas. I’d say people in general have quite different concepts and reactions to the word ‘love’ and to what they mean by it. Would you talk about your view of these various classifications of love?

Loren I don’t think they’re essentially different. I recognise that love has many faces, or ways of being felt and expressed — I’ve just referred to at least four, parental, affective, physical, and sexual — but in my view they, and any other ‘classifcations of love’ you care to come up with, are just aspects of expressing the same thing … different degrees, if you like, on a variable continuum.

I absolutely don’t classify love as if different forms of it fell into exclusive categories. And I certainly don’t imagine that some forms of love are good and some are less good — or even bad. To me, love is love, and love is good. How can any love, especially mutual love, be bad? How can any of us compartmentalise classifications of love, as if we could judge the quality or validity of any mutual love, based solely on who loves each other and in what manner they do? You know what I mean? This is especially true in the West for sexual love — like, we think it’s OK if you’re a man and a woman and you love each other sexually, and we now also think it’s OK if you’re both men, or both women, and you love each other sexually … but … it’s not OK if you’re a man or a woman and you have a mutual love of almost any kind with a boy or a girl … except that it’ll become sexually OK on their 12th birthday, or their 14th, or 16th, or 18th, or whatever arbitrary age we determine for you.

I also don’t categorise the way in which that love’s expressed — whether protectively, emotionally, or physically. All that matters is that whatever you do is driven by mutual love. If that’s true, then there can be nothing inherently bad about the relationship.

Like most people, I’ve had any number of relationships in my life, but only three outstandingly powerful ones, and two of those were with boys — the other was with my wife. They each differed in their expression, but they were all based on, and driven by, mutual love. I wasn’t born understanding this. I learned it in fact from a boy, the first of those three people I have loved so deeply, many years ago. He asked me one day, after we’d known each other about three months, “Loren, do you think it’s all right for a guy to love another guy?” and I said, in what was then nothing more for me than a dispassionate intellectual position, “Yes, of course. You can love anybody”. He was silent for a few minutes, and then said, “That’s good, because I love you”. I suddenly realised that he was expressing something I could never have said, and that he’d got it dead right — it was so silly for us to say things such as “I like you a lot” or “I enjoy your company” or “You’re my best friend” when the truth was simple — we loved each other. I felt shamed by his honesty. I said, awkwardly, “I love you too”, knowing he was right. He reached up to me and we embraced each other for the very first time with this new understanding. In fact he put his lips on my face and searched around with them rather wetly for my mouth and then breathed again in my ear “I love you more than anyone”. He was 12 years old, and he meant it. He knew what it was he felt far better than I did. I learned from him that love has nothing to do with gender or age.

Bulletin Except that, as you’ve just said, at least sexual love ends up having a lot to do with age, if only legally … in fact it’s one of the biggest taboos in our society, if not the single biggest taboo, for an adult to have sex with a child. When we look at the lack of respect many adults accord even their peers, especially when they’re driven by the throes of sexual desire, it’s easy to see that an unscrupulous adult could readily take advantage of a child who is less savvy and at a vulnerable stage in their sexual development. How do you protect at least very young, disadvantaged, or easily intimidated children who can’t or won’t communicate any abuse they experience? For that reason alone, aren’t age of consent laws necessary?

Loren Perhaps. But this is a very multi-faceted, complex, and contentious issue. It sounds like a simple question, but it isn’t. I can’t really do justice to such a thing with a few short comments. Bluntly, I favor no age of sexual consent at all.

This is not because I’m keen for people to be able to have sex liberally with very young children, but because I can’t for the life of me see any particular advantage to setting an arbitrary age of consent. We have to be very clear about what we are trying to achieve with such laws and whether or not they achieve it.

In my opinion, what society is trying to achieve is much what you said — the protection of defenceless children against sexual exploitation and abuse. I don’t believe we achieve that protection from harm by setting arbitrary age limits to sexual experience. After all, the USA has an age of sexual consent, but few would suggest that the USA has thereby lowered its incidence of sexual abuse against children. The same’s true of my own society, where there’s not only a lower age of consent than in the USA, but a good deal more sexual openness and liberality than Americans are used to. You’d think that might ease some of the sexual repression that drives abuse, yet New Zealand children do still suffer sexual exploitation at the hands of unscrupulous people. Abusers are not going to stop abusing just because there’s a legal stipulation about consent at this or that particular age, and even more so when they are confident the child won’t report the guilty secret that they now feel a part of.

What sexual age of consent laws do achieve is that they make a public statement about sex with people younger than a specified age being seen as universally wrong, and then provide a punitive response for when it happens, and of course only if it’s reported or discovered, which is rare. They don’t distinguish abuse from non-damaging sexual experience, and they don’t prevent or reduce abuse in the slightest, but simply allow for a punishment after the event.

For a start, these laws formalise messages to kids that I think are quite distorted and actively destructive — the underlying admonishment is that if you’re a kid it’s wrong to have sexual feelings or interests, and that it’s sure as hell wrong for a kid to have any sexual experience, especially with a more knowledgeable person. Since sexual feelings, interests, curiosity, and later explorations are part of any child’s normal development, such laws thus reinforce an already existing culture of sexual guilt in children who can’t square their instincts with the messages. I’ve had a boy of 14 sobbing his heart out on my shoulder in abject terror because he was convinced he was evil since he couldn’t stop having “sexual thoughts”. In an admittedly extreme case, I know another family whose 14-year-old son went on a rampage through the house with a baseball bat, and later in counselling unearthed deep anger at society and guilt in himself over secretly wanting to have sex. How can we visit such emotional atrocities upon our children? How can we demonise a child’s natural desires, and demonise too any adult who might respond with love and support and the guidance of experience?

By criminalising a lot of quite normal and positive sexual behavior, including a developing child’s utterly natural interest in ‘grown-up’ sexual experience, these laws increase the likelihood that children will associate sex with guilt, will close the windows on their inner instincts, and if they are abused, will say nothing about what has happened because they believe it to be the result of their own ‘criminal’ desires. Horrifyingly, abused children do believe, almost universally, that they are the guilty ones. I feel that far from decreasing the incidence of sexual abuse, these inflexible ‘moral’ laws subtly create a milieu that increases the prospects for it. That’s hardly our purpose.

The amazing thing is we don’t need them. Society already stipulates in standard assault laws that you can’t impose yourself physically or damagingly on other people, and that adults who abuse and damage children are doing something seriously wrong for which there are even more stringent punishments. We don’t need to separately specify sexual impositions. In fact we actively should not.

Bulletin No age of consent at all is a fairly dramatic suggestion. It would surely demand a virtually inconceivable change in mindset by most adults. For instance, you say “sexual feelings, interests, curiosity, and later explorations are part of any child’s normal development”. Some people may agree with that only up to a point — they could well take issue with the idea that childhood experience might include sex with an adult. Do you see a child’s having sexual experience with an adult as “part of any child’s normal development”?

Loren I agree it would require a quantum mindset change in the Western world. But it does stack up. We shouldn’t be so afraid of the idea that we don’t even examine it.

To reach that mindset, I think we have to go through a series of logical steps. The first is to recognise that children are sexual, in their own way and appropriate to their development stage. The second step is to understand that sex, in and of itself, is not the problem … but that sexual exploitation or abuse is. Finally, we can then identify what the abuse problems actually are, look at whether we think children are more at risk of abuse than adults and why, and then consider whether or not age of consent laws deal with that effectively. My view is that they don’t.

First, let’s look at the sexual nature of children. Pretty much since Victorian times, the Western world has been dogged by the notion that children are not sexual, that humans only begin to be sexual at the onset of puberty. Anyone with a memory that stretches back before their own puberty, or anyone who deals with children regularly, and is honest with their observations, knows what utter nonsense that idea is. All that happens in puberty is that children gradually start to become physically more adult in their sexual potency and mentally more focused in their sexual desires — when they have them. Good grief, I discovered the thrill of masturbation in the bathtub when I was seven and by the time I was eight you couldn’t have stopped me. It was simply too nice a thing not to do, and a wonderful way to send myself to sleep every night. I think that’s entirely normal, especially for boys, whose genitals are external, very visible, and tend to announce themselves rather obviously from time to time. Even newborn baby boys get erections and they also feel pleasure if their genitals are stimulated — which, by the way, I’m not advocating, but in Samoa [a South Pacific Island nation] it used to be common for mothers to masturbate their baby sons to sleep, a practice that’s probably been westernised out of them by now.

Children are sexual creatures just as all humans are. The difference — and it’s important — is in their focus and intent. Common sense should tell us that a seven-year-old boy hardly has the same sexual drive or clarity as a lad well into puberty. This doesn’t make the seven-year-old non-sexual. It makes him sexual in whatever way is appropriate to his age or development, just as the pubertal boy is, in his later way. If we can accept that and see it in its age-appropriate perspective, we then can bring ourselves to the second issue I raised — is sexual experience a good or bad thing for a child?

Well, surely the answer is obvious. It might be either. It depends on the nature of the experience. That’s in no way different from adult sex, by the way. Why would it be different? Adult sex can be good or bad, and I’m not talking about the quality of the experience — “how was it for you?” — but about the nature of the experience.

Sexual activity, per se, is an utterly natural event. A little boy’s penis becomes erect. It feels warm and tingly when it does. He touches it. That feels even nicer. Little girls also investigate their genitals in much the same way and feel much the same glow of bodily pleasure when they do. All this is fine and good. It’s exploratory and natural. I imagine most of us are comfortable with that idea. It’s no less natural for children to show an interest in the bodies of others, and in whether they have the same feelings and reactions. How is it different for a child to ask his friend if his toes goes wrinkly in the bath as well, from the same boy asking his friend if his penis also goes stiff and tingly when he rubs it? Children have no dark motives — they operate simply on the basis of discovering things, checking if they’re the same for others, and enjoying trying them out. A friend of mine and I once walked into her eight-year-old son’s bedroom to find him with his pants down, surrounded by his younger sister and two of her friends. The three little girls were taking turns playing with his penis, which was dutifully erect for the occasion. There was an awful lot of giggling going on. I’ve also stumbled across even younger kids in such utterly normal activity: for example another friend’s six-year-old daughter playing grab-it games with her four-year-old brother’s erection, much to his chortling delight. I left them to it. Bear in mind that these activities are little more than gleeful fun. They do not have the focused motives they’d have with people in and beyond puberty.

Are we grown-ups still feeling comfortable with this? I am. But what if we consider a child showing similar interest in an adult? A friend’s seven-year-old son once deliberately cupped my genitals through my pants and wriggled his fingers and laughed uproariously with “it tickles down there, don’t it?”. That was all. He was happy enough that I agreed with him. It confirmed his own experience. I’ve even had a six-year-old boy jump into bed with me for a morning wake-up cuddle, and during it, unexpectedly clasp my penis under the bedclothes and ask me “why do willies stick out like that sometimes?”. What do you do in a situation like that? Well, you do two things — first, you be honest (I told him that penises got filled up with extra blood sometimes, and he said “yeah, mine does that too”), and second, you don’t take him anywhere he hasn’t thought of going (he let go of me, had his completely non-sexual morning cuddle, and then asked if I would get up now and turn on the shower for him because he couldn’t reach the controls).

Another friend told me of a much more detailed experience with a boy of eight, a family friend. The boy had called him into the bathroom wanting my friend to wash and rinse his hair for him in the tub. He did, and as the boy climbed out, he asked if my friend would dry him. Standing there getting a very parental rub-down, the boy had sprung an erection in the space of about half a second. He giggled and said “my willy’s gone stiff”, to which my friend just nodded, and the boy added knowingly “when it’s stiff it gets all tingly if you rub it”. My friend asked him if he had washed inside his foreskin in the bathtub. He said “what d’you mean?” so my friend explained about pulling the foreskin back and washing inside and the boy leaned over the bathtub and did that for himself. He turned back with a grin on his face, his arms wide, and said “d’you wanna dry my willy for me?”. My friend shrugged and patted the junior erection dry with the towel. The boy put his arms around my friend’s neck and said in his ear “don’t stop, cause I wanna have a shock”. “A shock?” my friend said, and the boy explained, as patiently as if he were the adult, “if you rub it to and fro really hard you go all wobbly and get a big shock”. My friend squatted there, speechless. “Go on,” the boy urged, and my friend obediently rubbed the boy’s penis to and fro with the towel until he rapidly went “all wobbly” and got his “big shock”.

Is this bad? Were these various boys harmed by their momentary forays into testing a grown-up man’s reactions? Was the eight-year-old damaged in any way by having an experience he already knew about, anticipated, and asked for from someone he knew well and felt completely safe with? Incidentally, that brief and boyish bathroom orgasm never led to anything more. Eight-year-olds do everything for the moment, and such a moment simply didn’t occur again.

Sex can be bad for kids, of course, just as it can be bad for adults too, but it can also be fun, as most kids find out. What’s important is to see that in none of the situations I’ve touched on, whether in sex play with other children, or in sexual explorations with a trusted adult, did these youngsters ever step outside their own natural boundaries. Those boundaries can differ a lot for different children, and at different stages, but the point is that the kids were in charge of what they did, were responded to with honesty, truth, and affection, and were not taken beyond any point they did not already understand.

It’s not sexual experience that’s bad for children, it’s sexual abuse.

Abuse takes many forms. At one end of the scale there’s the patently obvious abuse of sexually violating a physically inferior and defenceless child. But at the other, less apparent end, there’s the abuse of encouraging a child’s natural interest in sex to lead them somewhere they didn’t originally think of going. There’s an awful lot of middle ground as well. Whatever happens, if sexual contact with a child is driven by what the more knowing person wants, the situation is exploitative and potentially abusive. On the other hand, also whatever happens, if sexual contact with a child is driven by what the child wants and understands, the situation can never be described as abusive, exploitative, or damaging. It behoves any thinking adult who is ever even slightly involved in the sexual experiences of a younger person, no matter how mutual those experiences are, to be mindful of what the youngster wants and enjoys rather than what they, as an adult, would want and enjoy.

Bulletin A lot of adults would find that level of self-control difficult.

Loren Yes, they would, and the more so since children are almost by nature often both intensely attractive and teasingly seductive. But if society has a problem with child sex, it isn’t, in my view, the problem that children are sexual, nor the problem that children do from time to time seek and have sexual experiences — no matter who with or of what physical kind — but it is the problem that children are and will be sexually exploited and abused by more knowing people. So let’s be very clear about this. We do not need to constrain the sexual nature of children, nor to constrain their natural sexual activity. What we do need to do in any society is constrain older or more knowing people from exploiting those natural truths.

But how?

Do we really achieve this by setting arbitrary ages of sexual consent? I’ve said I don’t believe we do. I believe age of consent laws are little more than an ineffective, even negative, knee-jerk reaction to a range of preconceptions that the western world has had about children and sex. They are preconceptions focused either on our interpretations of ‘age’ or on our understanding of ‘consent’.

As far as ‘age’ is concerned, the western world’s interpretations are based on the largely unexamined beliefs that children by definition are not, or should not be, sexual, that sex is by definition bad for children, or that sexual contact between a child and an older person is by definition abusive. Believing these things to be universally true, we outlaw sex below a certain age, and then get tangled up in defining what that certain age should be, what constitutes a ‘child’, and thus at what arbitrary age sex changes from ‘bad’ to ‘good’.

That tangle is even further confused by our notions about ‘consent’. We feel that sexual activity should be consensual. I agree with that absolutely. Anything else horrifies me. But again we make arbitrary gut-driven decisions about who is capable of giving that consent, and in this respect at least, we base that on calendar age. Just as I don’t believe sex is a good or bad experience dependent solely on calendar age, but rather on its circumstances, nor do I believe that the consensual mutuality of sex depends on calendar age either, but again, on its circumstances. There’s no shortage of adults who make bad calls about their sexual consent, and there’s equally no shortage of youngsters who are capable of knowing what they want or don’t want and being right about that.

The only things that meaningful consent requires are knowledge and understanding. Adults talk a lot about ‘emotional maturity’ as well. It’s a handy catchall phrase, but I’m not sure many of us have ever worked out what we mean by it in a purely practical sense. I think we mean the capacity to make dispassionate judgements about the consequences of any situation, and to base our decisions and actions on those judgements rather than be driven solely by our feelings. I think we do our children a disservice to assume they can’t ever behave in an emotionally mature way. On the contrary, children always amaze me by their ability to make an enormous range of decisions about their actions, about what’s a good idea to do, or not, about what’s safe, or not. I think children can be remarkably sensible, breath-takingly so at times. As often as not — I’m cynical about these things, as you are rightly guessing — it’s the grown-ups who mess things up. Humans have never been all that great at emotional maturity. We are all subject to letting our feelings dictate our actions, even when we know better. We all pay the price for that, don’t we? Time after time.

What underpins emotional maturity, at least makes it possible, is what I said before — knowledge and understanding. It’s that simple. Perhaps more adults would conquer emotional maturity too, if as children they were allowed to practice it.

I lost my virginity, technically, when I was 12. It was my own decision, and it flew in the face of everything I had ever been taught. I knew very well that adults denied sex to youngsters on the grounds I’ve already mentioned here — that they were not physically mature enough for it, or emotionally mature enough for it, or that it was simply ‘wrong’ morally. I didn’t buy any of that. I knew it was all rubbish. First, I knew from my own experience that I was physically mature enough for sex, that I could already start a baby if I didn’t take care. I also felt that the never fully defined quality ‘emotional maturity’ was largely a matter of knowing and understanding the consequences of any decision I made, and I couldn’t see that I would have gained significantly more knowledge or understanding by the time I was, say, 19 instead of 12 (and I was right, as it turned out). And finally, I decided (and I still believe this) that ‘wrongness’ is largely a social issue, that morality is driven by the need for safety. I understood that my body, mind, and emotions were all now ready for sexual experience, and that since such a situation was clearly ‘natural’ in a biological sense, I simply could not square that observable fact with the unnatural discipline of abstaining from sex for whatever contrived reasons my society came up with. At that time I realised the entire issue was a safety issue. Nothing more than that. It was unsafe, I concluded, for kids to have sex — it was sure unsafe for me to have sex, with a girl anyway, since there were no condoms small enough to fit me at the age of 12, and I couldn’t have bought any if there were. This whole thing made me very angry — in fact I wrote a rather infamous high school essay about it at the time I was 14.

Given safety, any person of any age can consent to anything as long as they know and understand what it is they’re consenting to. So how can we make an arbitrary decision about when a person becomes ‘old’ enough to consent to anything? What we should be doing is ensuring that people of any age have knowledge and understanding, that they’re informed enough to make their consent decisions meaningful, and that their society is supportive enough for their decisions to be safe.

It’s remarkably easy to do that. And it’s just as easy to empower a child as an adult.

Above all else, the main disservice we do our children in western society is to maintain their ignorance. We do this under the guise of that magic word ‘innocence’, a concept so sacred that we’re hardly even allowed to suggest it might be wrong. But I am going to suggest that. The problem is that most people interpret ‘innocence’ as ‘not knowing’, so to protect a child’s precious ‘innocence’ we protect them from ‘knowing’ things. This is absurd. Innocence has nothing whatever to do with a lack of knowledge. Even technically, in Latin, it just means ‘undamaged’ or ‘unpoisoned’, not ‘unknowing’. Innocence has to do with a lack of both guilt and guile. Children — and some happy adults — are innocent, not because they don’t know something, but because their attitude to what they do know is free of guilt, and free of ulterior motives or manipulations … those darker qualities, sadly, belong to grown-ups. What I do agree with is that innocence is a precious quality that should be preserved in anyone of any age. But I don’t at all agree that preserving it means keeping children in the dark. I think it means keeping their spirit alive, maintaining their joy and wonder at living, and their free and guiltless simplicity towards life and all it has to offer.

We gain nothing by maintaining children in ignorance. Nor do they. If children understand the need for a balanced diet, they will become more capable of making balanced decisions about what they eat. If they understand the benefits and dangers of fire or electricity, they will become more capable of making decisions about their own safety. If they understand the mechanics, and the joys and dangers, of sex, they will become more capable of monitoring their own developing sexual desires and experiences. So the simple truth is that we can empower our children to take charge of their own bodies to protect themselves, largely through the simple expedient of informing them. A child should know about sex, and also should know that sex is not always a good thing and that whether it is good or bad in any situation is something they can assess for themselves, or even better, seek advice about from someone they trust. This is very much a part of the ‘good touch bad touch’ philosophy that is fortunately starting to gain ground over the old fashioned ‘never talk to strangers’ one.

This approach does work. When I was a child I was indoctrinated with the arbitrary and inflexible ‘never talk to strangers’ rule, but I was never told why, and even at eight I thought it was a stupid idea — I actually said, with the seriousness that only an eight-year-old can muster, “But what if some guy in the street asks me the time? Surely it’d be rude not to tell him” — I’d recently been given a new wristwatch and that notion seemed very important to me at the time. On the other hand, friends of mine today have an eight-year-old son who I’ll call Sam. Now Sam has been brought up quite differently from my generation, and one day when he and I were horsing around and I started tickling his belly and his belly button, he chortled and wriggled with glee and then suddenly admonished me with, “Don’t you go and tickle me lower down, Loren, ’cause you’re not allowed to touch my penis … unless I say so. All right?” I think that’s very all right. There’s nothing special about Sam — he’s just a kid who knows about penises and what fun they can be, but how personal they are, and he knows he’s in charge of what happens to his, or for that matter to any part of his body. I’m absolutely certain that if someone else deliberately played with his penis against his wishes, he’d mention it to his parents. And by the way, I loved that “unless I say so” bit … how empowered is that?

I know of another situation in which a young man in his 20s was given the ‘I say so’ quite differently by a 12-year-old boy, who he’d known for some time. He and the boy were immensely fond of each other, indeed they loved each other and had expressed that truth between them already, and one day the boy simply said “Are you gay? Do you want to do sex with me?” My friend was staggered. “It’s all right,” the boy told him. “I’m not gay, either, but I’ve been thinking … you know … that we do love each other … and I wouldn’t mind … if we did sex with each other.” My friend, who like me believes in honesty with kids, replied “Well, yes, I guess I’ve thought about it too … but then … I think … you’re only 12.” The boy was quite affronted. “Shit, don’t treat me like a dumb kid,” he said. “I know what I want. I just wanna know if you do too.” My friend embraced the boy, a little awkwardly, and they lay together in silence for a few moments. “So what do you want to do?” my friend said. “Shit, I dunno,” the boy exclaimed. “I never did it before … not with anyone, I mean. But I want to do something. Only you gotta show me what.”

Both these boys — and they are real boys — were capable of consent. How wonderful they both felt empowered enough … the eight-year-old to draw a boundary and expect it to be respected, and certainly to know what to do if it was not respected, and the 12-year-old to make it clear that he was interested in raising the boundary and exploring his sexual instincts, with the guidance and safety of someone he loved.

In the end, the central issue in ‘age of consent’ is not the age, but the consent, and we need to recognise that properly informed and empowered a person of virtually any age can give consent. One of the best child and youth crisis services on the planet — a British one — describes on its website what sexual abuse is, with the brief and straightforward explanation for its young readers that it’s “when someone makes you do sexual things when you don’t want to”. That “when you don’t want to” is fantastic — it reassures the kids that sex, and wanting sex, are not wrong in themselves, but that there’s a lot wrong with being made to do anything sexual … “when you don’t want to”.

Isn’t that what we’re actually after here? To protect young humans from being used sexually by someone else, entirely for the other person’s pleasure and without the youngster’s informed and happy consent? Isn’t it true that a child who understands sex and its good and bad uses, will be informed enough to give or refuse consent meaningfully, and empowered enough to know what to do if they are ignored?

Bulletin And is it true that you’re saying this is possible to achieve at any age, and that therefore society does not need to stipulate a bottom line, the safety net of age of consent laws?

Loren Yes, I am more or less saying that. But remember that I’m saying it because I think that age of consent laws do not offer a bottom line or a safety net anyway. They simply don’t.

But I am not saying we should do nothing at all, that we should just abolish the whole idea of age of consent in the new-age hope that everyone will be nice to children. I think there’s a range of societal actions we can take or foster that will have meaning, and will work in reducing child abuse, and I think they vary slightly depending on the developmental stage of the youngster concerned. I just don’t think that an arbitrary age of consent law is one of them.

We might call this approach ’stage of consent’ rather than ‘age of consent’.

Roughly speaking, non-adult humans can be divided into three developmental stages … babies and infants, pre-pubescent children, and pubertal youngsters. I’m not putting calendar years to these three stages because I don’t think nature does that. Their own behavior generally makes it obvious whether and when any young human is at the stage of infant, child, or pubertal youngster.

Few people would feel entirely comfortable about a person having sex with a baby or infant — it’s difficult to imagine any meaningful level of ‘happy consent’ having been given for such an act, notwithstanding those historical Samoan mothers gently masturbating their baby boys to sleep. Sadly, things far more morbid than that do happen, though. One has to ask where the caregivers were, if a baby or infant was accessible to be sexually abused in the first place. Surely an infant’s first line of defence is their family. Surely that’s where their protection lies. An age of consent law does not guarantee in any way the right a baby has to bodily safety and dignity. It just provides for a punishment after anyone has gone ahead and abused that right. As I said earlier, standard assault laws already do that. What babies and infants need, regardless of any punitive assault law, is the active and constant protection of their families.

At the other end of the scale, youngsters of pubertal age and beyond don’t really benefit from a legal blanket either. For a start, they’re already capable of quite full sexual experiences, and usually keen as mustard to try some of it. They’re also capable of deciding what they’d be happy with trying, and of not allowing themselves to be physically overpowered or subjected to unsought sexual activities against their will. What pubertal youngsters need for any tentative sex they choose to begin experiencing — again regardless of any punitive assault law — is support, advice, and the tools of safety.

If there’s any grey area, it’s the middle category, all those children who are old enough to not be under their family’s constant protection, yet still young enough to be easy to persuade or intimidate by an unscrupulous older person. But I still say that age of consent laws will not protect those children. Abusers of easy-to-target younger children like that are also not going to stop because there’s a legally expressed barrier, if only because the odds are so good that the child will never report them anyway.

Let me quote you something all too real here, from a man who habitually seduced young children.

“I look for the kid who looks vulnerable — you know — the one who doesn’t have much confidence, who’s probably been taught to obey adults no matter what. And I really know that I have it made if no one’s explained anything about sex to the kid. Then I can tell him or her anything I want and he or she will believe me. When parents don’t talk to kids about sex or abuse, and when the kid knows he or she can’t ask questions, that’s when I have no trouble getting a kid to go along with me. Maybe parents should know that. If they want to protect their kids against someone like me, they should talk to them — tell them honestly what could happen.”

That’s from a recorded interview with a convicted child abuser. It was quoted by Cynthia Crosson Tower in her 1989 book Understanding Child Abuse and Neglect.What children in that middle stage of development need, regardless of any punitive assault law, is knowledge and the power that knowledge gives, the absolute understanding that they can say no when they mean it, and that they have a right to do so and to tell someone if they’re ignored.

I don’t think punitive after-the-event age of consent laws contribute to reducing the sexual exploitation of these children, but I do think that empowering children does — in one fell swoop it would virtually eliminate the sexual exploitation of children other than by violent rape, and sadly almost nothing can prevent that dysfunctional extreme. Beyond infancy, any child is old enough to educate, and thus to empower with control of their own bodies and an understanding of their rights to bodily respect and their ability to speak out. This is not some theoretical hope of mine — I know many children of remarkably young ages who know and understand this, and they are safer because of it. I have to say that even in the horrific circumstance that they were forcibly abused, such children would at least not also suffer the added trauma of not understanding what happened, of blaming themselves for it (which most children do), and of suffering lifelong emotional distortion as a result.

So taking on board the idea of not having an age of consent at all demands quite a few prerequisites, doesn’t it?

• First, it demands an acceptance that children are sexual creatures and have a right to some dignity, respect, and self-determination in that regard.
• Second, it demands an acceptance and understanding that innocence is not ignorance, and that informing children does empower them to protect themselves or seek protection when they feel disadvantaged, intimidated, or exploited.
• Third, it demands a society in which parents and caregivers do take real and active responsibility for their children, especially their infant children, and are there to be the trusted fall-back ones.
• Fourth, it demands a society that provides both safety and support for pubertal youngsters who need, want, and seek sexual experience.
• And lastly, it demands a society that nevertheless has strict general laws against, and severe penalties for, the exploitation and abuse of children (or anyone for that matter), and not just sexually, but in any way.

Age is nothing. Consent is everything. But since I don’t believe that any society can accurately determine when and how a young person becomes capable of giving what I’ve called ‘happy consent’, I guess you’ll say I ought to provide some other measure. But frankly there isn’t one. Children develop so differently from each other and at such a different pace that I’d defy anyone to say, categorically, that this or that nine-year-old isn’t at a meaningful ’stage of consent’, or that this or that 14-year-old is. It comes back to what I said earlier about being informed and empowered. I think all children beyond the earliest infancy are capable of being informed, and certainly capable of understanding that they should share any concerns they have with an older person they trust. I think all children are capable of having and enjoying sex when they are moved to do so, and should know they have the right to do so without shame or guilt, and in absolute safety.It does work. I’ve talked a great deal to people who run child counselling and youth crisis intervention services in a number of countries, and they all say one thing in common — the real problem is that most youngsters feel powerless, that they don’t think they’ll be taken seriously if they say no or if they speak out about what is happening to them. This is dreadful. It is so easy to empower them and not have that situation exist. It is so easy to support them and make their natural interest in sex a safe one. I’d much rather see societies actively protect their infants, empower their children with knowledge, provide both acceptance and small size condoms for their pubertal youngsters, and forget about ineffective age of consent laws altogether.

Bulletin Aren’t you postulating a rather ideal society, though? Isn’t it unrealistic to imagine a society with such caring adults and such empowered children?

Loren No, I don’t think it’s idealistic. That suggests I’m imagining something that is beyond human nature as we know it. This is not. On the contrary, it’s making use of human nature … both the instinct most adults have for protecting children, and the instinct most children have for trying things out within the safety reference of their protectors. It’s far more unrealistic to set up sex and sexual experience as some kind of special case, which is what the Western world does, to surround it with myth and magic, to make it untouchable, to embed it in guilt. That’s idealistic. In reality, penises are no more magical or mysterious than eyes or elbows, sexual activity is no more sacred than riding a two-wheel bicycle, and knowing about sex, good and bad, is no different from knowing about food, knowing what you like, what you don’t like, and how to think about what you eat. Having the support and safety of your protectors is just as much a child’s right with sex as it is with riding that two-wheeler for the first time without falling off and grazing your knee, or any other human activity that has to be learned, understood, and practised.

I concede that expunging the West’s paranoia and guilt about sex is not an easy thing. It won’t happen tomorrow morning. But I have been in other non-Western societies, usually much smaller and simpler ones, where a great deal of what I hope for does exist … where the adults really do look after the interests of the children, and where the children learn without arbitrary constraints about anything and everything that interests them — sex included — and are entitled to embrace life and practice its skills, freely, safely, and without shame or guilt. Amazingly, left to get on happily with learning to be young humans like that, the kids turn out to be remarkably self-pacing and sensible, and happy to seek practical help and advice when they need it. This is true even with sex. Youngsters growing up in such a community, free to try anything out, with the safety and support of their elders to fall back upon, find the very notion of a sexual ‘age of consent’ ludicrous. What happens in the real world where sex isn’t a magical mystery tour shrouded in guilt, is that the youngest children generally don’t bother with it much, older children do little more than happily fiddle with each other experimentally when the mood takes them, which isn’t all that often, and the oldest kids are — not surprisingly — knowledgeable, experienced, and remarkably self-monitoring. In fact one boy in such a village, a boy of 14, nailed the common sense of those kids down for me when he confided rather glumly that now he’d started ejaculating he had to stop having ‘proper sex’ and he and his girlfriend had decided to do other things instead for a year or two, at least until they felt old enough to look after a baby if they started one. Kids are not stupid, you know. It’s grown-ups that are stupid.

But I know the western world is not ready for such relaxed self-confidence yet. So although I’d like to live in a society that had no legally proscribed age of sexual consent because they didn’t need one, I’m prepared to be realistic and accept something more pragmatic. In that case, forced to come up with an arbitrary number, I’d go for 10 as a reasonable age for allowing legal consent, at least for the moment in current western society. You could probably easily persuade me down a bit — I think an informed eight-year-old is capable of saying no and of seeking help if the no is ignored, or of saying yes and not being damaged by an activity he has allowed. A yes or a no isn’t carved in stone, either, remember that. A young boy is equally quite capable of saying yes, but “stop if I tell you to, ok?”. OK.

No matter how persuasive some of the points I’ve made may be, a lot of people are going to accept them intellectually more easily than emotionally — they’re still going to read this and think “Omigod, sex for eight-year-olds?!” Think back. In my own life I was masturbating regularly by eight, and had put together a mine of fuzzy information about what grown-ups did sexually, and by nine I was already fascinated by the idea of men having sex, because I knew that a man was what I would become, and man-style sex was what I needed to practice. So I was consciously keen to try out something sexual with another person. I figured it must be way better than doing it by myself. Every adult I know who I have ever had this discussion with has admitted the same — that they were actively sexual by eight or nine, and interested in trying sex with others. Most of them didn’t try that until later. Nor did I — it took me four years to get around to it. But we knew about it, and thought about it, and were even quite clear in our focus about it — for instance, every gay person I know says they knew they were gay by the time they were nine.

I don’t think eight years old is a dramatic suggestion, and certainly not 10. I think it’s realistic. I’m not suggesting that kids are rampantly sexual at a young age, just that they are sexual. We’re not discussing here all the other things they do … sport, reading, goofing around. Even the most ardently lusty boy in the full throes of puberty is unlikely to spend more than about two percent of his waking time actively doing anything sexual, but it’s a valid and perfectly normal two percent of his time, and for those few frantic minutes of any day he’s certainly very focused on sex and not lacking in knowledge or understanding of what he’s doing and what he’d like to do.

There are, of course, societies that already have no arbitrary age of sexual consent at all, and I have to say that to the best of my knowledge they don’t have any greater problem with child sexual abuse or exploitation than the rest of us do, in fact arguably much less. Countries that do have sexual age of consent laws also differ widely in the ages they set — all the way from a very adult 21 down to a pubescent 12 — which makes it obvious the selected age is completely arbitrary. In the western world, Spain and The Netherlands have the lowest age of consent (it’s 13 and 12 respectively) but I think The Netherlands have got the formula just right. I can’t spout the details with legal certainty, but I understand they effectively have three ages of consent depending on the circumstances. It’s generally 14, but it can be 12 if there is no complaint from the youngster or their parents, and it has to be 16 if the older person is in a position of natural authority over the younger one — a teacher, group leader, or counsellor, for instance. How amazingly realistic and sensible that three-tiered system is. If nothing else, it’s a great statement about human realities, and a great set of guidelines for adults and children alike. If we have to have a legally defined age at all, I like that approach.

Bulletin Even though I lean toward your way of thinking, I unabashedly praise your clear, forthright and thought-provoking argument. It’s an old adage that morality cannot be legislated, and the increasing violence in the world speaks of a growing frustration that will not be ultimately resolved by repression. A brighter future depends on free speech, intelligent speech, sharing views and experiences, discussions and dialogs among all peoples. As you have said, knowledge and understanding are key. First and foremost is the concept that education never ends.

Thank you Loren, for sharing yourself and opening another door to alternatives and insights.

Edward P. Warren

This week I want to bring to your attention one of the most important figures of the aristocratic pederasty movement: Edward Perry Warden, known also as Ned Warren.

Born to a wealthy family in 1860’s Boston, he was educated at Harvard and at Oxford’s New College. It was while at Oxford that he met John Marshall, an archeologist who would become a close friend of his. Together they leased “Lewes House”, a  mansion in East Sussex, which they turned into a meeting place for “men interested in the arts and the ancient world”. Needless to say that the men shared more than a generic interest in the arts. They were a true coterie of pederasts.

An independently wealthy man, Warren traveled Europe and the world extensively, collecting many works of art, most of which with pederastic themes. The most famous of these works is, undoubtedly, the “Warren Cup”, which he purchased for a mere £2,000 from a dealer in Rome.

Detail from the Warren Cup: An erastes has sex with his eromenos, as a young slave boy watches surreptitiously from behind a door.

Detail from the Warren Cup: A youth has sex with a younger boy

Aside from art collecting, Warren was also a prolific writer. His best known work is “A Defence of Uranian Love”, which he wrote under the pseudonym Arthur Lyon Raile, and was privately printed in the late 1920s. The book, his magnum opus, as he liked to call it, was perhaps the first modern pederastic apologia. In it, Warren describes the main reason for collecting Classical art: to convert the works of art into a “paederastic evangel”, in order to promote boylove as the purest and most superior form of love.

A Defence of Uranian Love, by Edward Warren

“My verses and my prose,” wrote Warren, “advocate a morality, but it is not the current morality in certain matters.” This is understatement at its most playful, for Warren’s Defence is a detailed map to a Utopia where “Grecian grandeur” is restored, and the “Christian sublime,” all but banished; where masculine virtues topple the feminine that have mistakenly led to democracy, sexual purity, and feminism; where aristocracy, nobleness, and male supremacy establish a civilisation in which Nietzsche would have found himself at home; and where paederasty, in the form familiar to the ancient Spartans, could and needs must flourish. For, according to Warren, “Love” (in this case, Boy-love) “can revive the old Hellenic day.” It is this revival – this veritable “Renaissance of Paederasty”-that Warren’s elaborate apologia aims to begin, by reminding Western culture of what it has lost or only forgotten: a sacral Boy-love and its accompanying traditions.

Warren was the prototype of the educated pederast, the lover of the Classical World, the aristocrat who was disenchanted with modern society, a society which had been hijacked by feminism and populism, a society that had not only forgotten its Western heritage, but had also condemned it to eternal damnation.

I know most of us lead busy lives, and that some visitors to this blog only skim through the posts to look at the pictures. However, for all those interested in pederasty and boylove, its history and its value, reading John Francis Bloxam’s “The Priest and the Acolyte” is a must.

John Francis Bloxam was an English poet and priest. While studying at Oxford’s Exter College, he submitted, in 1894, a beautiful story to The Chameleon, a one issue periodical for which he also served as an editor. The periodical also contained Lord Alfred Douglas’ poem Two Loves, which, along with Bloxam’s work, would later be used against Oscar Wilde in his trial.

“The Priest and the Acolyte” is a tragic story about a love affair between a Catholic priest and a 14 year old acolyte. It describes what the priest feels toward the boy, and how the love is reciprocated. It explores the priest’s mindset, and his struggles with his “sins”. At the end of the story, the priest is confronted by the rector, and he stands up for what he believes in a pure, direct, and unapologetic way.

"Bodo" by Otto Lohmüller

Despite the tragic end, the short story is fascinating. One can really tell that Bloxam understands the priest’s psyche in a way that only another pederast could. It is also interesting because it deals with pederast priests, a category that still seems to be alive and well in the 21st Century. But perhaps what makes this story unique is the fact that it was written in the late 19th Century, and is a true reflection of the “Uranian” pederasty movement of the time.

Here are some fragments of the story:

“He saw the oval face flushed with shame at the simple boyish sins he was confessing, and a thrill shot through him, for he felt that here at least was something in the world that was beautiful, something that was really true. Would the day come when those soft scarlet lips would have grown hard and false?”

"Patrick VI" by Otto Lohmüller

“And that night, and for many nights after, the priest, with the pale tired-looking face, drew the curtain over his crucifix and waited at the window for the glimmer of the pale summer moonlight on a crown of golden curls, for the sight of slim boyish limbs clad in the long white night-shirt, that only emphasized the grace of every movement, and the beautiful pallor of his feet speeding across the grass. There at the window, night after night, he waited to feel tender loving arms thrown round his neck, and to feel the intoxicating delight of beautiful boyish lips raining kisses on his own.”

“He said the solemn words with a reverence and devotion that made the few poor people who happened to be there speak of him afterwards almost with awe; while the face of the young acolyte at his side shone with a fervour which made them ask each other what this strange light could mean. Surely the young priest must be a saint indeed, while the boy beside him looked more like an angel from heaven than any child of human birth.”

“‘There is no sin for which I should feel shame,’ he answered very quietly. ‘God gave me my love for him, and He gave him also his love for me. Who is there that shall withstand God and the love that is His gift?’

‘Dare you profane the name by calling such a passion as this “love” ?’

‘It was love, perfect love: it is perfect love.’”

The full text can be found here.

Directed by Jean Delannoy, the film was released in 1964.

Quite rarely does a film touch one’s soul like “Les Amitiés Particulières” has touched mine.

Based on the novel of the same name, Les Amitiés Particulières tells the touching story of a romantic relationship between a beautiful 12 year old boy and an upperclassman in a 1920s French Catholic School.

Georges de Sarre, an aristocratic French youth is sent to the Catholic boarding school. He quickly develops feelings for another 14 year old boy, Lucien Rouvière. As it turns out, Rouvière is already involved in a homosexual relationship with another boy in his class, André Ferron. After Georges gets André expelled in order to be with Rouvière, Rouvière decides to embrace Catholicism and fight his homosexual impulses. But another boy, beautiful Alexandre, catches Georges attention. The film exquisitely deals with how the relationships starts and develops, and how it is dealt with the various priests in the school.

Rouvière and Georges

Beautiful Alexandre, played by Didier Haudepin

The Confessor Priest and Alexandre

The novel, written by Roger Peyrefitte in 1948, is largely autobiographical. In fact, Peyrefitte was known for his pederastic inclinations: While on the set of the film, Peyrefitte met the 12-year-old aristocrat Alain-Philippe Malagnac d’Argens de Villèle, who had been cast as a choir boy and was a big fan of the book.

The novel's front cover

Not only did Peyrefitte sign Alain-Philippe’s copy of the book but the two also fell in love, pursuing a stormy relationship that Peyrefitte chronicled in some of his later novels such as Notre Amour (1967) and L’Enfant de cœur (1978).

In order to avoid spoiling the film, I will not go into further plot details, but in my opinion, it is unlike any other films. Though released in the early 60s and being black-and-white, it is never dull, and  always exquisite. I would dare say that it is probably one of the best films I have ever seen.

Embedded below is part 1 of the film. The rest of the parts can be found on Youtube (both in the original French version, and the English subtitled one).

Lord Byron at age 25, by R. Westall, 1813.

As it is common with many distinguished British gentleman, there is a lot of their lives we don’t know. Lord Byron’s bisexuality, for example, has only been recently unveiled, having been censored for a long time. What still has yet to be fully publicized, however, was his pederastic inclinations (both as an eromenos and as an erastes).

As a Harrow boy in 1804, he lived his first homosexual experiences, both as the younger and the older partner. Though the information is quite murky, it is believed that he had a sexual relationship with his tenant at Newstead Abbey, Lord Henry Grey de Ruthyn, a much older man. If the boy found it “traumatic”, we do not know, but the fact of the matter is that Byron went on to cultivate many “special friendships” with boys at Harrow. Byron refered to his school friendships as “passions“, and his nostalgic poems about his Harrow friendships, ‘Childish Recollections’ (1806), express a sense of melancholy at the passing of youthful freedoms, even a prescient ‘consciousness of sexual differences that may in the end make England untenable to him.’

“Ah! Sure some stronger impulse vibrates here,

Which whispers friendship will be doubly dear

To one, who thus for kindred hearts must roam,

And seek abroad, the love denied at home.”

Morning Splendour, by Henry Scott Tuke

Perhaps the most lasting of those Harrow friendships was with John FitzGibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare, a boy four years Byron’s junior. That means that even at their oldest, the boys were 18 and 14, respectively. Given the tender age of both boys, it is unknown whether the boys recognized their relationship as romantic, or just “went with the flow”. Records show, however, that a sexual relationship very likely occured.

It was at Cambridge’s Trinity College, that Byron really became a full-fledged erastes. He befriended John Edleston, a younger choirboy who Byron considered his “protegé”. In later years he described the affair as ‘a violent, though pure love and passion’. As he had done at Harrow, Byron played both the erastes and the eromenos roles. He befriended older men while at Cambridge, including Francis Hodgson, a fellow at King’s. It is unknown, however, whether these friendships evolved into something deeper. In fact, by his own admission, Lord Byron’s true love was his genuine eromenos, John Edleston.

“Oh! ever loving, lovely, and beloved!
How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past,
And clings to thoughts now better far removed!
But Time shall tear thy shadow from me last.
All thou couldst have of mine, stern Death! thou hast;
The Parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend:
Ne’er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast,
And grief with grief continuing still to blend,
Hath snatched the little joy that Life had yet to lend.”

Lord Byron’s “To Eddleston”. 1817-1818.

√ May I suggest History Channel’s documentary on Lord Byron, mainly beacause it is freely available on YouTube. As it is common with most documentaries, a great deal of censure is present, so bear that in mind. Embedded below is the passage that deals with Byron falling in love with young Edleston.

Despite the safety and anonymity that the internet offers, there is no escaping the fact that publicly stating a pederastic attraction is not only frowned upon by the vast majority of people, but can also have some serious consequences.

Calling someone a pederast (remember that modern mainstream thought functions to-wit: pederast means “pedophile” which in turn means “child molester”) is akin to calling someone a Muslim terrorist. Pederasty is by no means an easy thing to advocate for.

But there are millions and millions of people in the world with such inclination. Make no mistake about it. I would even suggest that there might be more pederasts than androphile gay men (that has been, after all, the norm throughout history). This humble blog receives about 4500 daily visits. That’s almost 32000 people a week. Yet only a  small minority vote on the polls, an even a smaller minority comment on the posts. This mirrors the situation in the real world. There are millions of pederasts out there, but only a small fraction accept that attraction, and only an even smaller fraction are involved in some sort of activism.

There are four main ways of dealing with pederastic inclinations in modern society:

1. Rejection: Those who are attracted to teenage boys will repress all attraction, be it sexual (by not looking at pictures, for example) or emotional (by staying away from any place with a large concentration of adolescent boys).
2. Assimilation: A pederast adapts his inclinations to fit in with current norms and standards. Sexual pederastic impulses are repressed (or limited to self-stimulation), while emotional pederastic impulses can be nurtured, but never publicly acknowledged.
3. Semi-Activism: A pederast can anonymously fight to change public opinion. Thanks to the internet, it is quite an easy task. Offline, however, he likely will choose the assimilation route.
4. Activism: He stands up publicly for what he believes is right. He overtly challenges the status-quo. Often with dire consequences.

While certainly tongue-in-cheek, Jonathan King (here posing as Oscar Wilde) exemplifies the position of outright defiance:

Film is our era’s entertainment channel par excellence, and it is one of the best ways to capture a time’s values and customs. Had film existed in Classical Greece, there would be thousands of movies dealing with pederasty. Whenever pederasty was accepted, however, film, unlike other art forms, had not yet been invented. That is why there is no extensive pederastic filmography… At least not as extensive as the hundreds of thousands of paintings, sculptures, novels or plays dealing with it.

Luckily, I have had the opportunity to watch a decent sample of pederastic filmography, however. I believe the following five movies are quite representative of the different approaches filmmakers have taken in dealing with such a taboo subject.

• Death in Venice (1971): Directed by Luchino Visconti, it is the film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice. It is the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a German composer who becomes obsessed with a Polish boy (Tadzio, played by Björn Andrésen) while visiting Venice. The film can be quite dull for the modern viewer, but some people say it’s worth watching just to see Andrésen, who they claim is the “most beautiful boy in the world”. Personally, though I love the story’s leitmotif, I find the film adaptation to be rather tedious, and Andrésen’s beauty much overrated.

• Du Er Ikke Alene (You are not alone, 1978): An endearing Danish coming-of-age film, it tells the story of two boarding school boys, Bo and Kim, who fall in love with each other. It was one of the first films that dealt with boy-exclusive pederasty, that is, a homosexual relationship between two underage boys, with one being older than the other. It has a very 1970s “liberated” feel to it. Too bad Kim’s hair makes him look a tad too girlish.

• Voor Een Verloren Soldaat (For a Lost Soldier, 1993): Walking the line between pedophilia and pederasty, this Dutch film, based on a true story, portrays the romantic and sexual relationship between a 22 year-old Canadian soldier and a 12 year-old Dutch boy during the North American liberation of Nazi-occupied 1944 Holland. The film is an adaptation of the book written by choreographer Rudi van Dantzig, who viewed his relationship with the soldier in a very positive light. The film is a bit slow at times, but the story and its treatment definitely make it worth watching.

• The Man Without a Face (1993): Probably the most mainstream of these titles, this Mel Gibson film is a beautiful coming-of-age story about the friendship between Chuck, a 13-year-old boy (superbly played by Nick Stahl) and a deeply scarred former teacher (Gibson). The film is an adaptation of Isabelle Holland’s 1972 novel of the same name, and, while the book makes it clear that the relationship was also sexual, the film is much more ambiguous. It is nonetheless a beautiful story, with excellent acting, and a truly great portrayal of an emotional pederastic relationship, and of people’s irrational fears towards it. Quite probably one of the best films ever made.

• L.I.E. (2001): Long Island Expressway (L.I.E.) is one of the most recent films dealing with pederasty.  Directed by Michael Cuesta, it’s the story about a tumultuous relationship between a 15-year-old boy (played by Paul Dano), and an older man, known as “Big John”. The film differs from the previous titles in that it does not seem to romanticize the relationship, but rather realistically explores it. Released in the 21st Century, in the middle of the Hysteric Era, the film received an NC-17 rating from the MPAA, even though it does not graphically portray any sexual activity between the boy and “Big John”. The film does carry some 21st century prejudices in its portrayal, but it is nonetheless a refreshing film… And a brave one at that.

All of these films can be watched or bought online, and most of them are available on YouTube or other online streaming websites. If you can suggest other titles, please feel free to do so.

"Socratic Love". Erotic painting by Edouard-Henri Avril, depicting Socrates getting ready for sexual intercourse with his pupil, Alcibiades.

The Uranians were a small group of poets, who constituted a pederastic artistic fellowship during Victorian England. While their exact membership is unknown, three major figures stand out: Gerard Hopkins, Walter Pater, and, of course, Oscar Wilde. The Uranians saw themselves not as a “subculture”, but as the culture, the true heirs of the Western Greco-Roman tradition. As Pater wrote in his piece, The Renaissance (1893), “Hellenism is not merely an absorbed element in our intellectual life; it is a conscious tradition in it”.

This profound admiration for the Classical world is probably rooted in their elite education. In fact, all of the Uranians were educated at Eton and/or Oxford in a ‘Greats curriculum’ based on the close reading of Greek and Latin texts. As a result, they all shared an appreciation for a Greco-Roman world in which ‘paiderastia, or boy-love, was a phenomenon of one of the most brilliant periods of human culture’. Hence, even at their most oblique, these writers were Classically allusive enough to have been understood by their Oxford-educated coterie, a coterie to which they were often responsive, a coterie that can rightly be said to have constituted a ‘fellowship of pederasts’.

"The Hit", by Lord Frederick Leighton

Far from a means of evasion, allusions to the Greeks were a tool for valorization in a strategy for social acceptance. Surveying the allusions, one sees that they are largely to asymmetrical relationships, either clearly age-structured, or between a god and a mortal, or a warrior/hero and his protégé […], or various combinations thereof. […] Such relationships today are regarded as inherently morally culpable, paternalistic and patronizing at best, exploitative or even ‘abuse’ at the worst; to hold up such relationships as an ideal is accordingly viewed either as self-justification on the part of the ‘superordinate’ party, or hypocrisy. Yet this inequality is part of the objective outline that Uranians saw in their Greek mirror; the Greek relationships were asymmetrical, and the Uranians saw themselves in this outline and filled in their own features. After all, the Uranians believed that Grecian pederasty had not only been sanctioned by the gods, but had also seeded Western philosophy, had spurred military bravery, had inspired the highest arts, and had cradled democracy.

Of course, their views were at odds with the social and moral norms of Victorian England, so the poets were forced to navigate between the Victorian norms and those of the ancient Greeks. As a result, there were different approaches on how to deal with the “boy issue” among the Uranians. On one hand, there was a compromising view, that which was conciliatory to the era’s social orthodoxies. Gerard Hopkins (a Jesuit priest) sublimated most, if not all, his pederastic desires. So did, for the most part, Walter Pater (though he did actualize his desires once, which threatened his academic career). On the other hand, there was a perversely dissident view. Instead of adjusting boy-worship to the time’s norms, Uranians like Oscar Wilde overtly rebelled against them, and in fact actualized almost all of his the pederastic impulses.

There was also a common distaste for women among the Uranians. Unlike today’s “gay men”, the Uranians were strongly masculine, and were frontally opposed to feminism or egalitarianism (theories in which today’s gay rights movement are actually based on). Uranian poet John Addington Symonds’ translation of the ancient Greek dialogue Erôtes is, in this regard, quite paradigmatic:

Not only did the poets voice a clear preference for boys, but Uranian writers, such as Frederick Rolfe were deeply misogynistic. The Uranian landscape was dominated by men – their bodies and activities, their forms of beauty – often hailed at the direct expense of women. A scathing passage from Rolfe’s The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole expresses the author’s view about the body of women, and indicates a strong revulsion towards females, to the point of describing their bodies as a “a parrot crossed with a jelly-fish”. These sentiments were not caused by, as many  politically-correct critics hold, the “homosocial environment” the Uranians lived in. The Uranians did not repudiate women because they were surrounded by men. They repudiated women because they thought that even in the field of beauty, boys were much superior to women. Consider these other two poems:

√ This concludes part I on Pederasty and Victorian England. Since it is a very extensive topic, I deemed it better to divide the posts into two or three instead of concentrating everything into one single post.Comments are suggestions are welcomed (and remember, they are totally anonymous, you do not need to provide your email or name, just leave it blank).

It is common for many homophobes to denounce homosexuality and pederasty as unnatural, since, as they claim, it goes against the l”aws of nature”. They argue that since two males cannot have children, homosexuality will end up altering the natural course and even bringing the human race into an “endangered species” level.

Beautiful boy by Pierre Joubert

While this sounds blown out of proportion and absurd, there is some validity to what they say. Current androphile “gay men” cannot procreate, and most likely will never do so in their lives. Since they are in a “partnership” with another man their age, and they have assumed a “gay identity”, they will never even consider having children with a woman. That is where pederasty differs from androphile homosexuality. Historically, men who engaged in pederasty did not stop getting married, and many had children. In fact, many pederasts (especially the emotional kind), have a strong desire to be fathers and have children of their own. Pederasty was something parallel to marriage and family, and it never intended to substitute it.

Homosexual relationships among teenage boys are also immune to the procreation argument. In the past, a large number teenage boys “fooled around” with other boys, and very few of them ended up not marrying, or living permanently with another man. Fooling around was just a way to experiment, just another sexual outlet, which, like pederasty, was totally unrelated to future plans of marriage or children. When homosexuality became an “identity”, all homosexual conduct had to submit to the new “gay” (or even worse, “queer”) rules. Nowadays, doing something homosexual means you are gay. That is one of the reasons that explains that homosexual experimentation among teenage boys might be decreasing. Not too long ago jacking off your friend was “fooling around”, today, it’s “being gay”.

Gorgeous boy by Vladimir Timofeev

This change in paradigm has removed two healthy outlets adolescent boys used to have (pederasty and fooling around), and have left them with very limited options. This could explain why so many teenage boys are having sex with girls so early (and thus getting them pregnant), or why there has been a rise in violence or sadistic trends among teens.

There is of course a wider “not natural” argument against pederasty: Since boylove is completely absent in all other species, it is unnatural. The Greeks responded to that criticism arguing that precisely because of that, pederasty was superior, since it necessitated the smartest and more capable of the species to envision it. But perhaps Goethe said it best:

Pederasty is as old as humanity itself, and one can therefore say that it’s natural, that it resides in nature, even if it proceeds against nature. And what culture has won from nature will not be given up at any price.

-        Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, April 1830

I have been extremely busy lately. That’s why I couldn’t post last week. And that’s why I still haven’t finished a couple of historical research pieces on pederasty in the Renaissance and in Victorian England. So today, instead of unwrapping historical truths, I will explore the psychological (or sexologist) theories behind pederasty.

The pederastic attraction usually starts as an emotional attraction towards boys entering adolescence

As many of you are aware of by now, pederasty and homosexuality were not two distinct phenomena until the late 20th Century, when the feminist and “gay-rights movement” completely changed the paradigm and tossed away any pederastic elements from the newly defined homosexuality. In part because of that, the study of pederasty became something linked to a marginal group, and the only research done on the subject was framed in “child abuse” or “mentally disorder” paradigms. As we have seen, these theories are absurd, but most of the researchers still subscribe to them.

Despite its obvious bias, psychologists usually distinguish four groups of sexual attraction, each of which is linked to the “age of attraction”:

• Pedophilia: Sexual attraction to children, especially prepubescent children. In our society, almost synonymic to child abuse. Many “strict pedophiles” do not have much of a gender preference.
• Hebephilia: Attraction to pubescent individuals, especially those in the early stages. Age range: 12-15. Some absurdly see it as a type of pedophilia since they regard anyone under 18 a “child”, without noting that many countries in the world, such as Spain or Japan, have 13 as the age of consent.
• Ephebophilia: Attraction to teenagers, especially those in their latter teenage years. Age range: 15-19. While its reputation is not as tarnished as hebephilia, the confusion between how a child is defined clinically and how a child is defined legally is still strong, to the point that the media will label anyone who has an intimate relationship with a minor (<18) as a “pedophile”.
• Teleiophilia: Attraction to adults (20-60 aprox). Also known as androphilia when dealing with homosexuality.
• Gerontophilia: Attraction to the elderly (>60).

Historically, pederasty can be described as a mix between hebeophilia and ephebophilia.

Sometimes, pederasts might be attracted to boys as young as 11, but the attraction is usually emotional (not sexual) in nature.

However, many believe these definitions are incomplete, and pederasty cannot be limited to any of them. The above clinical definitions tend to treat sexual orientation as part of an unbreakable sexual identity, though some do admit that there are individuals that may display certain “tendencies”, and not not necessarily be limited to them. The rule of thumb they use, however, is that someone belongs to the group that he prefers. That is, an adult man who prefers teenage boys to men will be labeled as an “hebephile” or “ephebophile”, while one that generally prefers adults but also likes teenagers, will be labeled as a “teleiophile” with “hebephiliac/ephobhiliac” tendencies.

Let me suggest my own definition of a pederast:

1. A pederast is a male who feels an attraction (be it sexual, emotional, or both) towards adolescent boys (12-19).
2. He need not be attracted to all of the ages included in the above definition, and might have a preferred “age of attraction” (which is generally strongest in the 13-16 range).
3. He does NOT feel the same way about adolescent girls.
4. He might display other sexual preferences, the most common being heterosexual teleiophilia.
5. He is usually very good at establishing friendships with adolescent boys, and generally will make excellent fathers (especially to sons, to whom is unlikely that he will be sexually attracted).

How about you? Do you agree with the above definition? What is your ideal age of attraction? Any comments are welcomed, and poll votes are encouraged, since it helps with the research.

]]> http://eromenos.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/boy-magazines-of-the-pre-hysteric-era/ Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:26:18 +0000 eromenos http://eromenos.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/boy-magazines-of-the-pre-hysteric-era/

Can you imagine any of these magazines (which were freely sold not only in gay bookstores but in newsstands) being published (yet alone sold) today? Some of these magazines were published as late as the 80s… Who would’ve thought that society would so severely censor anything boy-related just a few years down the road? Today, only Destroyer Magazine tries to do something remotely similar to what these vintage joys did. And the backlash it faces is staggering.

(Click on thumbnail to enlarge pictures)

Pre-Nazi Germany was a unique period in history. The inhibited way the Germans looked at body culture, and the way they used it in raising their youth in exploring comradeship, nature and sports was laden with many classical Greek and pederastic signals. It is not at all surprising then, that the first modern pederastic publications arose during that time.

The roots of the modern homosexual movement can be found in fin-de-siècle Germany. After a few years of a rather united existence, there was an important rift within the movement. On one hand, there were those who supported Magnus Hirschfeld and his “Scientific Humanitarian Committee”, and, on the other, those who opposed his views, such as pederasts Adolf Brand and Benedict Friedländer.

Hirschfeld’s views were uncanny similar to today’s LGBT theory. Influenced by the spread of the “medical model” in studying homosexuality, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee supporters believed that homosexuals were part of a “third sex” (Zwischenstufen), a group of “physic hermaphrodites” that, as a minority, had to be “protected” and “tolerated”. Today, the “LGBT” groups, in a kind of throwback to the nineteenth century, argue that homosexuality is inborn, that it is genetically determined (“we can’t help it that we’re gay, we were born that way, so please don’t discriminate against us”). The “gay movement” today seeks special treatment for a special kind of person who has adopted a “gay” identity – “gay people” – rather than seeking to liberate the repressed sexual potential of everyone. For them, what matters is identity, not practice.

One of the first "Der Eigene" covers

Brand and Friedländer were frontally opposed to such absurd theories. Brand and Friedländer were heirs to the classical homosexual tradition, that is, pederasty. Organized around the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen and its flagship publication Der Eigene, these men believed in an inherent bisexuality of human beings and felt that younger and older males were naturally attracted to each other. Furthermore, they argued that pederasty was a positive good for society because it helped to socialize young males and provided them with a safe and necessary sexual outlet.

Friedländer, for example, ridiculed the “third sex” concept of “a poor womanly soul languishing away in a man’s body” branding the concept as “degrading and a beggarly pleading for sympathy.” He insisted on a historical approach that also took into account anthropological evidence, and wrote: “A glance at the cultures of countries before and outside of Christianity suffices to show the complete indefensibility of the Zwischenstufen theory. For example in ancient Greece, under such theory, most of the military leaders, artists, and thinkers would have had to be “psychic hermaphrodites”.

Pre-World War II anonymous Austrian drawing depicting two Wandervogel boys

The Gemeinshaft views inspired many in the nationalist movement of the time as well. Many in the youth Wandervogel movement, such as Hans Blüher, believed that pederasty and male bonding provided a basis for a stronger nation and state. Indeed many of these men believed that, as Friedländer wrote: “Only he who is a good pederast can be a perfect pedagogue.” Thus, they supported a pederastic society, in which a system similar to the erastes-eromenos mentoring would be established in order to help adolescent boys become both men and citizens. Later on, many of these views were adapted to fit in with Nazi ideology, which is what gave rise to organizations like the Hitlerjugend.

As time went by, however, with the rise of egalitarian/gender theories and feminism, the Hirschfeld view ended up prevailing and the homosexual movement ended up lumped with the “LGBT” movement… as if transgendered people had anything to do with the noble and ancient practice of pederasty.

√ For those interested in learning more about the homosexual and pederast movement during the Weimar Republic, may I recommend Harry Ooesterhuis’s “Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany”, which includes original transcripts from “Der Eigene”.

Rabbi allegedly told boy to lie

Founder of the Chabad of Colonie accused of sexually abusing 2 boys

Robert Gavin – Albany Times Union

August 26, 2009

ALBANY — The sexual abuse case against a Loudonville rabbi now includes allegations he repeatedly slapped and kicked one 13-year-old boy and tried to get another child to remain silent.

Yaakov Weiss, 29, founder of the Chabad of Colonie and the Chabad Hebrew School, was initially charged in City Court last fall with sexually abusing the two 13-year-olds in 2007.

He was arraigned Tuesday in Albany County Court on a superseding four-count indictment that includes those charges, as well as allegations he tried to convince one of the two youngsters to lie about the sex abuse to his mother and police.

“Just say nothing happened,” Weiss told the child on June 30 on Sycamore Street in Albany, the indictment said.

Weiss, who already faced charges in City Court in connection with the alleged incidents, was indicted Aug. 14. He faces up to one year behind bars on misdemeanor charges that include sexual abuse and child endangerment.

The rabbi pleaded not guilty before Judge Stephen Herrick as his family looked on from the gallery. Freed without bail, Weiss later exited the courthouse, his wife by his side and daughter on his arm.

The indictment contends Weiss took a far more menacing role two years ago.

It alleges that sometime between Jan. 1 and April 30, 2007, Weiss repeatedly struck one 13-year-old on the back on New Scotland Avenue, “knocking him to the ground and then kicked him in the leg.”

The court papers say Weiss sexually abused one of the boys in June 2007 and the other between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31 of that year. The incidents allegedly took place in a facility at 340 Whitehall Road in Albany.

In both cases, the indictment alleged that Weiss had sexual contact “consisting of placing his penis in contact with said child’s buttocks.” The incidents allegedly took place inside a pool, called a mikveh, used by some Jews for ritual purification, according to his attorney.

The indictment said one of the boys sought advice from Weiss, his teacher and spiritual leader, on Sycamore Street on June 30 that year.

Weiss allegedly “instructed the child to be untruthful” and to “not tell his mother or the police about an incident where the defendant subjected the victim to sexual contact.”

Arnold Proskin, the lawyer for the rabbi, told reporters the allegations are baseless. He said one of the alleged victims is related to another rabbi with a possible ax to grind against his client.

Asked why the case went from City Court to Albany County Court, Proskin said, “Press coverage,” adding, ”I’m being serious. There’s no advantage (to it).”

Weiss sent an e-mail to the Times Union last October, after being charged, calling the charges “100 percent untrue.”

“This has been generated by an individual who has been antagonistic toward Chabad of Colonie from its inception and continues to be envious of continued success,” Weiss wrote at the time. “This is his way of getting rid of us.”

Weiss moved to the Capital Region from Iowa in 2004. He adheres to a branch of Judaism known as Chabad-Lubavitch, which is known for its work to get Jews more involved in their religion.

In October, Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, chairman of Merkos L’inyonei Chinuch, the educational arm of the Brooklyn-based worldwide Lubavitch group, told, the Times Union the rabbi was suspended. He added it was in “no way whatsoever implicating him or an admission or a decision of guilt.”

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=834832&category=YTCOLONIE

Also see:

Rabbis to Honor Suspect Homo Bishop of Scandal-Ridden Albany, NY Diocese

Priest’s mysterious death complicates Albany bishop’s quest to clear his name

Pederasty in the Yeshiva

Benedict to Offer Words in Response to Clerical Sex Abuse

Bishop Fisher Says Activist Parents of Two Girls Repeatedly Raped by Priest are “Dwelling Crankily on Old Wounds”

“No One Accuses Us”

Throughout the classical world, pederasty was a subject of extensive analysis by philosophers. Some challenged the status quo and overtly denounced the practice. While such a view grew more popular as Greece fell into decadence, it was practically unheard of during the Classical Period, when, not coincidentally, Athens enjoyed its cultural and political zenith.

Beautiful art by Oneiros

The philosophical disagreements over pederasty were limited to the form a pederastic relationship should have. In Phaedrus, Socrates made a distinction between “philosophical pederasty” and “sexual pederasty”. To the philosopher, “philosophical pederasty” was the ideal relationship, the ultimate expression of human love. He described a man falling in love with a beautiful boy as divine, claiming that such love was “the best and noblest of all the forms that possession by a god can take”. This “philosophical” pederasty was erotic and physically intimate, but it did not include sexual intercourse (intercrural and other non-penetrative sex, however, seemed not to be a problem). Sexual pederasty, on the other hand, was not considered divine or ideal by Socrates, but was not condemned either. To the philosopher, sexually expressed pederasty was still held in high regard. Socrates only really criticized a loveless form of pederasty, which he considered shameful and damaging to both the erastes and the eromenos. That being said, Socrates seemed to keep his philosophical theories with his real-life actions separate, since he was known to patronize several boy brothels in Athens.

While Socrates’ critique of the status quo was quite ambiguous, Plato was more severe and direct. To Socrates’ disciple, only chaste relationships were acceptable, and both the erastes and the eromenos were supposed to be chaste and show self-restraint. In Laws, one of his most conservative dialogues, he actually seems to recommend the prohibition of pederasty, or at least, its sexually-expressed form. One should bare in mind, however, that Plato’s opinions in Laws break with many of his other previous works, such as Symposium and Phaedrus. In fact, some argue that the philosopher wrote Laws as an old man in prison, after having failed in his efforts to guide a Sicilian tyrant’s rule.

Von Gloeden

If one looks closely at Plato’s writings, however, he actually considers love between people solely as a homosexual phenomenon, whereas his discussion of sex includes both heterosexual and homosexual relationships. After all, in 5th century Athens, men were married to women only for reproductive ends, and the term ‘love’ was reserved for pederastic relationships.

Successive philosophers amplified the Socratic or Platonic pederastic ideal: the chaste, yet emotive and intimate relationship between a man and a boy, also known as “Platonic Love” (the term was coined during the Renaissance, but the definition has changed with time). In the embedded video, Plato’s disciple Aristotle, talks to his students about which form of pederasty is detrimental, and which is positive, and excellent. Since the clip is from Hollywood’s Alexander (2004), the words of the philosopher are changed to “love between men”, instead of between men and boys, which was, after all, what the discussion would have been about. The fact that the boy who prompts the question refers to “Achilles and Patroclus” is also a Hollywood attempt to frame Aristotle’s speech in androgenic homosexual terms, instead of pederastic ones. Hollywood’s anachronisms and manipulations, however, belong to another post.

There are three dimensions of pederasty, each of which based on different characteristics of the attraction: the nature of the primary attraction, the exclusivity, and the permanence.

Nature of Primary Attraction

Emotional ———————- Sexual

This continuum refers to the nature of the primary attraction, that is, which type fuels the attraction towards an adolescent boy. An emotional pederast, for example, might value spending time with the boy or sharing ideas and thoughts with him more than a sexual pederast. A sexual pederast will find the promise of sexual relations the most alluring aspect, and that will definitely be the force that drives the attraction. It is important to bear in mind, however, that an emotional attraction can go hand-in-hand with an erotic attraction. That’s why even in purely emotional pederasty, the boy’s looks are a very important attractor.

It is also worth noting that within one person, the primary attraction might differ depending on the age of the boy. It is not uncommon to be more emotionally attracted to 12 year old boys than 16 year-olds; and more sexually attracted to 16 year-olds than 12 year-olds.

Exclusivity

Exclusive ———————- Non-Exclusive

A purely exclusive pederast will only be attracted to adolescent youths, while those who are non-exclusive might, at the same time, be attracted to women, or men, or a combination thereof.

Permanence

Temporary ———————- Permanent

Temporary pederasty refers to a passing attraction. Many young men go through a “pederastic phase”, during which the primary focus of their attractions are teenage boys, but they eventually abandon it, at least partially, in favor of adult women (or in some cases, adult men). Permanent pederasty, on the other hand, is a life-long primary attraction to adolescent males.

Classical pederasty was not a set-in-stone model, but it tended to be emotional (yet erotic), somewhat exclusive and temporary. Some argue , however, that today’s notions of classical pederasty have been influenced by Platonic thought, and that in reality classical pederastic relationships were much more sexual than what the philosopher would have liked.

Today’s society doesn’t seem to like gray areas, or complex terminology. The simpler the concept, the better. Homosexual relationships can be either good or bad. The “good” homosexuality is defined by the word “gay”. It largely refers to relationships that are androphiliac in nature, and are usually stereotyped as effeminate or flamboyant. On the other hand, there’s the bad kind of homosexuality, which is essentially everything else that doesn’t fit in the androphiliac box. Without differences being drawn, everything else is lumped together under the umbrella term of “perverted”, or “child molestation”.

Chiron and Achilles

Pederasty has nothing to do with pedophilia. A pedophile is someone who is, for some reason, attracted to children, that is, prepubescent kids. Some have some gender preference, but most don’t even bother (that’s why many pedophiles might enjoy dressing boys as girls and viceversa). Pedophilia has always been quite rare, and mostly frowned upon by all societies. Pederasty, on the other hand, has been celebrated in many, and was the most common form of homosexuality until very recently. A Pederast is someone who is attracted to teenage boys, ages ranging from 12 to 20 (in the sexual-orientation jargon this is known as ephebophilia). But the attraction needn’t be only sexual, or only emotional, nor should it always combine both. There have been many occurrences of chaste pederastic relations throughout history (but that’s for another post). The pederast will feel a strong love towards the younger partner, a type of love which sometimes borders on the parental. It is precisely this parental aspect that fueled the pederasty-based Greek system of education (or paideia). A Pederast will also be likely to go on and marry a woman, whom he will probably deeply love and care for. In a way, pederasty is somewhat of a training ground for fatherhood.  For example, the British composer Benjamin Britten, a well-known pederast who had many relationships with boys throughout his prolific life (all of them chaste), always hoped for a child of his own. Pederasty is thus entirely “natural”, since it does not interfere with procreation.

Judeo-Christian traditions and Feminism have unfortunately lumped this natural, ageless, and noble attraction together with perverted forms of sexuality. It is mind-boggling that a society that embraces andprophiliac “gay” relationships has such irrational hatred towards pederastic relationships, even when they’re completely chaste. They say history is constantly changing, and that is bound to repeat itself. Maybe one day there will be a re-acceptance of pederasty. It will probably go hand-in-hand with a Second Renaissance of some sort, which is something our painfully philistine society desperately needs.

The play and movie "The History Boys" illustrates the relationships between a teacher and his teenaged students in 1980s Britain. Some see the story as an homage to pederasty.

The United Kingdom in general, and in England in particular, have been hot spots for pederasty during the last few centuries. This is probably because England was one of the leading countries in intellectualism and interest in classics. And unlike France, England was never an egalitarian society. Intellectualism, interest in the classical world and the existence of an elite created the perfect breeding ground for pederasty to flourish.

The role of British “public schools”, that is, a private (usually boarding) school, in the establishment of pederasty has been crucial. The schools were (and still are) generally sex-structured, that is, boys and girls go to different schools. The promise of an all-boys boarding school made many men with an interest in adolescent boys to become teachers.

It wasn’t only teacher-pupil relations, however. Aside from those usually platonic and chaste relationships, in which the actual transmission of knowledge was seen as one of the most erotic acts, relationships among students also arose. The “prefect-fagging” system is in that sense paradigmatic.

Established by famed British educator Thomas Arnold the system partnered an older student (prefects, usually aged 17-18) with new students (“fags”, aged 12-13) in order to “build character”. The young boys’ duties consisted “of almost anything” prefects cared to impose, from running errands, carrying messages, cooking, blacking shoes, kindling fires, warming beds and toilet seats, to sexual favors.

The relationships were not always abusive, and many became romantic. Many actually were quite similar to the eromenos-erastes relationships of Classical Greece, with the older boy teaching, guiding and protecting the younger boy.

Pederasty also has its dark side. Since pederastic relations have been a common occurrence throughout history, they have also played a role in certain historical contexts with which one would not be too willing to associate with.

Many authors argue that Nazi’s S.S. actually started as a private homosexual military force orchestrated by notorious Nazi pederast, Gerhard Rossbach. Ernst Röhm was also known to have pederastic inclinations, and went on to build the dreaded S.A. Brownshirts. Julius Streicher, one of the most-prominent anti-Semites, had been accused of being intimate with boys in the past. And when Goebbels himself threw a private party in 1936, he made sure it featured “torch-bearing page boys in tight fitting white breeches”. According to British historian Richard Grunberger, the guests couldn’t help but “hurl themselves upon the page boys and pull them into the bushes”. All of these events are far from anecdotal. In fact, there was a strong Hellenophile component among the Nazi leaders, and certain military structures were based on the Spartan ideal. That being said, it is obvious that pederastic expression during the Third Reich was quite subdued, and certainly not equal to Classical or Renaissance forms.

Many in the gay rights movement also like to say that homosexuality was heavily persecuted during the Third Reich, and use the “pink triangle” concentration camp sign as proof. But what they fail to realize is that Nazis only targeted a particular kind of homosexuals, mainly the androphiles and the effeminates… In short, today’s “gay” or “queer” or “LGBT” people.

The reason behind the willingness to get rid of these types of homosexuals was Natalism: Since androphile homosexuals would not reproduce, they weren’t contributing to the perpetuation of the master Aryan race. Such was not generally the case of pederasts, who, since Ancient Greece, would get married and have children, once their eromenos became an erastes himself.

Defend the Family’s Scott Lively actually acknowledges the distinctiveness of pederasty. He writes that “Masculine-oriented male homosexuality tends also to be pederastic in nature,” …”meaning that it often involves relationships between adult men and teenage boys. The ancient Spartan army, for example, drafted young teens boys and paired them with adult homosexual soldiers. Brownshirt leaders in Germany recruited boys from the local high schools for sex. Roehm himself once briefly fled Germany for South America over a scandal involving a young male prostitute”. Mr. Lively goes on to say that that is the reason why “gays” should not be allowed in the military… An absurdly worded conclusion since the Nazi pederasts had nothing to do with today’s “gay men”.

The Nazi example illustrates how pederasty has not gone hand in hand with other forms of homosexuality, and proves that the current “gay” definition does not take these important behavioral and social differences into account.

Published in 1652 Italy, Alcibiades the Schoolboy (L’Alcibiade, fanciullo a scola), is a dialogue in defense of pederasty. Using ancient rhetoric and sophistry, this Renaissance piece depicts Alcibiades’ teacher (modeled after Socrates) trying to consummate the relationship with his pupil.

Even though it was first attributed to Pietro Aretino, an 1888 article finally identified the author as Antonio Rocco, an Italian philosophy professor, writer and libertine priest.

Due to its controversial nature, many copies were destroyed, and, in fact, only 10 copies survived the whole print run. The first Italian translation in 1862 was also condemned and largely destroyed by the authorities. As William Armstrong Percy III reminds us, an English translation took a long time to be published. Unfortunately, it still remains a very obscure work, and cannot be freely found on the internet, or in a bookstore for that matter.

Though the story is probably fictitious and in tune with the renewed interest in classical culture and traditions (such as pederasty) among the Italian cultured elite, it portrays the very common, and celebrated, relationship between a Greek aristocratic youth and his teacher.

There are no Homosexuals in Iran . Mehmoud Ahmadenijad

I found this very good article here.The author has reviewed the book on history of homosexuality in Iran by the famous Iranian academic Janet Afray , who is a Professor of History and Women Studies at Purdue University and also is the president of International Society of Iranian Scholars.  The book is called “Sexual Politics in Modern Iran”, the deals with the constructions of gender and sexuality over a wider historical period. Her extensive reading of the ancient texts have demonstrated the rather “normal” nature of homosexual relationships in Pre-modern Iran.  She demonstrates that the violent homophobia in Iran is the result of  Western modern influence. I differ with the assertion on Marxist oriented “homophobia” . The fact of the matter is that with The Glorious Russian Revolution of 1917 homosexuality became de-criminalized in one of the first acts by the revolutionary government. The claim of  “well documented condemnation of homosexuality by Marx” unfortunately is not very sound one. Passages from Engels have frequently been quoted by the anti-communists to spread of “myth homophobia inherent in communism”. These passages are usually taken out of context and looked outside the “scientific base” of that time to condemn Engels. The Homosexual Liberation Movement always had a strong Marxist element. The Marxist social democratic parties of Germany and Europe were the first to show sensitivity to homosexual cause and the later Gay Liberation Movement always had a strong Marxist element. The Stalinist regime reversed a lot of  Leninist reforms especially those regarding sexual freedoms and women rights and restored the “family”. These crimes should not be attributed to Marx and the Marxists. Anyway the article is very good and i hope you like it

Shaheryar Ali

IRAN’S HIDDEN HOMOSEXUAL HISTORY

Doug Ireland

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his infamous claim at a September 2007 Columbia University appearance that “”In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country,” the world laughed at the absurdity of this pretense.

Now, a forthcoming book by a leading Iranian scholar in exile, which details both the long history of homosexuality in that nation and the origins of the campaign to erase its traces, not only provides a superlative reply to Ahmadinejad, but demonstrates forcefully that political homophobia was a Western import to a culture in which same-sex relations were widely tolerated and frequently celebrated for well over a thousand years.

“Sexual Politics in Modern Iran,” to be published at the end of next month by Cambridge University Press, is a stunningly researched history and analysis of the evolution of gender and sexuality that will provide a transcendent tool both to the vibrant Iranian women’s movement today fighting the repression of the ayatollahs and to Iranian same-sexers hoping for liberation from a theocracy that condemns them to torture and death.

Its author, Janet Afary, president of the International Society of Iranian Scholars, is a professor of history and women’s studies at Purdue University who has already published several authoritative works on Iranian sexual politics, notably the revealing and award-winning “Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islam” (2005), in which she already demonstrated a remarkable sympathy for gay and lesbian people.

In her new book, Afary’s extensive section on pre-modern Iran, documented by a close reading of ancient texts, portrays the dominant form of same-sex relations as a highly-codified “status-defined homosexuality,” in which an older man – presumably the active partner in sex – acquired a younger partner, or amrad.

Shah Abbas and Wine Boy. Louvre

Afary demonstrates how, in this period, “male homoerotic relations in Iran were bound by rules of courtship such as the bestowal of presents, the teaching of literary texts, bodybuilding and military training, mentorship, and the development of social contacts that would help the junior partner’s career. Sometimes men exchanged vows, known as brotherhood sigehs [a form of contractual temporary marriage, lasting from a few hours to 99 years, common among heterosexuals] with homosocial or homosexual overtones.

“These relationships were not only about sex, but also about cultivating affection between the partners, placing certain responsibilities on the man with regard to the future of the boy. Sisterhood sigehs involving lesbian practices were also common in Iran. A long courtship was important in these relations. The couple traded gifts, traveled together to shrines, and occasionally spent the night together. Sigeh sisters might exchange vows on the last few days of the year, a time when the world ‘turned upside down,’ and women were granted certain powers over men.”

Examples of the codes governing same-sex relations were to be found in the “Mirror for Princes genre of literature (andarz nameh) [which] refers to both homosexual and heterosexual relations. Often written by fathers for sons, or viziers for sultans, these books contained separate chapter headings on the treatment of male companions and of wives.”

One such was the Qabus Nameh (1082-1083), in which a father advises a son: “As between women and youths, do not confine your inclinations to either sex; thus you may find enjoyment from both kinds without either of the two becoming inimical to you… During the summer let your desires incline toward youths, and during the winter towards women.”

Afary dissects how “classical Persian literature (twelfth to fifteenth centuries)…overflowed with same-sex themes (such as passionate homoerotic allusions, symbolism, and even explicit references to beautiful young boys.)” This was true not only of the Sufi masters of this classical period but of “the poems of the great twentieth-century poet Iraj Mirza (1874-1926)… Classical poets also celebrated homosexual relationships between kings and their pages.”

Afary also writes that “homosexuality and homoerotic expressions were embraced in numerous other public spaces beyond the royal court, from monasteries and seminaries to taverns, military camps, gymnasiums, bathhouses, and coffeehouses… Until the mid-seventeenth century, male houses of prostitution (amrad khaneh) were recognized, tax-paying establishments.”

While Afary explores the important role of class in same-sex relations, she also illuminates how “Persian Sufi poetry, which is consciously erotic as well as mystical, also celebrated courtship rituals between [men] of more or less equal status… The bond between lover and beloved was… based on a form of chivalry (javan mardi). Love led one to higher ethical ideals, but love also constituted a contract, wherein the lover and the beloved had specific obligations and responsibilities to one another, and the love that bound them both… Sufi men were encouraged to use homoerotic relations as a pathway to spiritual love.”

Unmistakably lesbian sigeh courtship rituals, which continued from the classical period into the twentieth century, were also codified: “Tradition dictated that one [woman] who sought another as ’sister’ approached a love broker to negotiate the matter. The broker took a tray of sweets to the prospective beloved. In the middle of the tray was a carefully placed dildo or doll made of wax or leather. If the beloved agreed to the proposal, she threw a sequined white scarf (akin to a wedding veil) over the tray… If she was not interested, she threw a black scarf on the tray before sending it back.”

As late as the last half of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th, “Iranian society remained accepting of many male and female homoerotic practices… Consensual and semi-open pederastic relations between adult men and amrads were common within various sectors of society.” What Afary terms a “romantic bisexuality” born in the classical period remained prevalent at court and among elite men and women, and “a form of serial love (‘eshq-e mosalsal) was commonly practiced [in which] their love could shift back and forth from girl to boy and back to girl.”

In the court of Naser al-Din Shah, who ruled Persia from 1848 to 1896, keeping boy concubines was still an acceptable practice, and the shah himself (in addition to his wives and harem) had a young male lover, Malijak, whom he “loved more than anyone else.” In his memoirs, Malijak recalled proudly, “the king’s love for me reached the point where it is impossible for me to write about it… [He] held me in his arms and kissed me as if he were kissing one of his great beloveds.”

In a lengthy section of her book entitled “Toward a Westernized Modernity,” Afary demonstrates how the trend toward modernization which emerged during the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and which gave the Persian monarchy its first parliament was heavily influenced by concepts harvested from the West.

One of her most stunning revelations is how an Azeri-language newspaper edited and published in the Russian Caucuses, Molla Nasreddin (or MN, which appeared from 1906 to 1931) influenced this Iranian Revolution with a “significant new discourse on gender and sexuality,” sharing Marx’s well-documented contempt for homosexuals. With an editorial board that embraced Russian social democratic concepts, including women’s rights, MN was also “the first paper in the Shi’i Muslim world to endorse normative heterosexuality,” echoing Marx’s well-documented contempt for homosexuality. Afary writes that “this illustrated satirical paper, which circulated among Iranian intellectuals and ordinary people alike, was enormously popular in the region because of its graphic cartoons.”

MN conflated homosexuality and pedophilia, and attacked clerical teachers and leaders for “molesting young boys,” played upon feelings of “contempt” for passive homosexuals, suggested that elite men who kept amrad concubines “had a vested interested in maintaining the (male) homosocial public spaces where semi-covert pederasty was tolerated,” and “mocked the rites of exchanging brotherhood vows before a mollah and compared it to a wedding ceremony.” It was in this way that a discourse of political homophobia developed in Europe, which insisted that only heterosexuality could be the norm, was introduced into Iran.

MN’s attacks on homosexuality “would shape Iranian debates on sexuality for the next century,” and it “became a model for several Iranian newspapers of the era,” which echoed its attacks on the conservative clergy and leadership for homosexual practices. In the years that followed, “Iranian revolutionaries commonly berated major political figures for their sexual transgressions,” and “revolutionary leaflets accused adult men of having homosexual sex with other adult men, ‘of thirty-year-olds propositioning fifty-year-olds and twenty-year-olds propositioning forty-year-olds, right in front of the Shah.’ Some leaflets repeated the old allegation that major political figures had been amrads in their youth.”

Subsequently, “leading constitutionalists enthusiastically joined the campaign against homosexuality,” writes Afary, noting that “the influential journal Kaveh (1916-1921), published in exile in Berlin and edited by the famous constitutionalist Hasan Taqizadeh, had led the movement of opinion against homosexuality… Their notion of modernization now included the normalization of heterosexual eros and the abandonment of all homosexual practices and even inclinations.”

When Reza Kahn overthrew the monarchy’s Qajar dynasty and made himself shah in 1925, he ushered in a new wave of reforms and modernization that included attempts to outlaw homosexuality entirely and a ferocious – ultimately successful – assault on classical Persian poetry. Iraj Mirza, previously known for his homoerotic poems, “joined other leading political figures of this period in encouraging compulsory heterosexuality.” These politicians and intellectuals insisted that “true patriotism required switching one’s sexual orientation from boys to women… Other intellectuals and educators pressed for the elimination of poems with homosexual themes from school textbooks.”

Leading this crusade was a famous historian and prolific journalist, Ahmad Kasravi, “who helped shape many cultural and educational policies during the 1930s and 1940s.” Kasravi founded a nationalist movement, Pak Dini (Purity of Religion), which developed a broad following. An admirer of MN, Kasravi preached that “homosexuality was a measure of cultural backwardness,” that Sufi poets of homoeroticism led “parasitic” lives, and that their queer poetry “was dangerous and had

Youth and Suitors

to be eliminated.”

Kasravi’s Pak Dini movement “went so far as to institute a festival of book burning, held on winter solstice. Books deemed harmful and amoral were thrown into a bonfire in an event that seemed to echo the Nazi and Soviet-style notions of eliminating ‘degenerate’ art.” Eventually, Prime Minister Mahmoud Jam, who held office from 1935 to 1939, acceded to Kasravi’s demand that homoerotic poems be banned entirely from daily newspapers.

Kasravi “based his opposition to the homoeroticism of classical poetry on several assumptions. He expected the young generation to study Western sciences in order to rebuild the nation, and he regarded Sufi poetry as a dangerous diversion. As preposterous as it might sound, Kasravi also argued that the revival of Persian poetry was a grand conspiracy concocted by British and German Orientalists to divert the nation’s youth from the revolutionary legacy of the Constitutional Revolution and to encourage… immoral pursuits.”

Afary adds sorrowfully that “most supporters of women’s rights sympathized with Kasravi’s project because he encouraged the cultivation of monogamous, heterosexual love in marriage… In this period, neither Kasravi nor feminists distinguished between rape or molestation of boys and consensual same-sex relations between adults.”

The expansion of radio, television, and print media in the 1940s – including a widely read daily, Parcham, published from 1941 by Kasravi’s Pak Dini movement – resulted in a nationwide discussion about the evils of pederasty and, ultimately, in significant official censorship of literature. References to same-sex love and the love of boys were eliminated in textbooks and even in new editions of classical poetry. “Classical poems were now illustrated by miniature paintings celebrating heterosexual, rather than homosexual, love and students were led to believe that the love object was always a woman, even when the text directly contradicted that assumption,” Arafy writes.

In the context of a triumphant censorship that erased from the popular collective memory the enormous literary and cultural heritage of what Afary terms “the ethics of male love” in the classical Persian period, it is hardly surprising as Afary earlier noted in “Foucault and the Iranian Revolution” that the virulence of the current Iranian regime’s anti-homosexual repression stems in part from the role homosexuality played in the 1979 revolution that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers to power.

In that earlier work, she and her co-author, Kevin B. Anderson, wrote: “There is… a long tradition in nationalist movements of consolidating power through narratives that affirm patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality, attributing sexual abnormality and immorality to a corrupt ruling elite that is about to be overthrown and/or is complicit with foreign imperialism. Not all the accusations leveled against the [the deposed shah of Iran, and his] Pahlevi family and their wealthy supporters stemmed from political and economic grievances. A significant portion of the public anger was aimed at their ‘immoral’ lifestyle. There were rumors that a gay lifestyle was rampant at the court. The shah’s prime minister, Amir Abbas Hoveyda, was said to have been a homosexual. The satirical press routinely lampooned him for his meticulous attire, the purple orchid in his lapel, and his supposed marriage of convenience. The shah himself was rumored to be bisexual. There were reports that a close male friend of the shah from Switzerland, a man who knew him from their student days in that country, routinely visited him.

“But the greatest public outrage was aimed at two young, elite men with ties to the court who held a mock wedding ceremony. Especially to the highly religious, this was public confirmation that the Pahlevi house was corrupted with the worst kinds of sexual transgressions, that the shah was no longer master of his own house. These rumors contributed to public anger, to a sense of shame and outrage, and ultimately were used by the Islamists in their calls for a revolution.”

Soon after coming to power in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini established the death penalty for homosexuality.

In “Sexual Politics in Modern Iran,” Afary sums up the situation for homosexuals under the Ahmadinejad regime in this way: “While the shari’a [Islamic law] requires either the actual confession of the accused or four witnesses who observed them in flagrante delicto, today’s authorities look only for medical evidence of penetration in homosexual relationships. Upon finding such evidence, they pronounce the death sentence. Because execution of men on charges of homosexuality has prompted international outrage, the state has tended to compound these charges with others, such as rape and pedophilia. Continual use of these tactics has undermined the status of Iran’s gay community and attenuated public sympathy for them. Meanwhile, many Iranians believe that pedophilia is rampant in the religious cities of Qum and Mashad, including in the seminaries, where temporary marriage and prostitution are also pervasive practices.” (Full disclosure: in her section on gays in today’s Iran, Afary cites my reporting several times and thanks me in the book’s acknowledgements for sharing materials and insights with her.)

In this necessarily truncated summary of some of Afary’s most significant and nuanced findings and revelations with respect to homosexuality, it is impossible to do justice to the full sweep and scope of “Sexual Politics in Iran,” the larger part of which is devoted to the role of Iranian women, and to their struggles for freedom which began in the 19th century. But as Afary herself writes, “[F]or a very long time even talking about the pervasive homoeroticism of the region’s premodern culture had been labeled ‘Orientalism’… [but] increasingly I found that one could not simply talk about gender and women’s rights, particularly rights within marriage, without addressing the subject of same-sex relations.”

This she has done with uncommon sensitivity, intellectual rigor, engagement, subtlety, and skill.

And for that, both Iranian lesbians and gays and feminists in that nation owe Afary an enormous debt of gratitude, as do all of us concerned with sexual liberation for everyone worldwide

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his infamous claim at a September 2007 Columbia University appearance that “”In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country,” the world laughed at the absurdity of this pretense.

Now, a forthcoming book by a leading Iranian scholar in exile, which details both the long history of homosexuality in that nation and the origins of the campaign to erase its traces, not only provides a superlative reply to Ahmadinejad, but demonstrates forcefully that political homophobia was a Western import to a culture in which same-sex relations were widely tolerated and frequently celebrated for well over a thousand years.

As late as the last half of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th, “Iranian society remained accepting of many male and female homoerotic practices… Consensual and semi-open pederastic relations between adult men and amrads were common within various sectors of society.” What Afary terms a “romantic bisexuality” born in the classical period remained prevalent at court and among elite men and women, and “a form of serial love (‘eshq-e mosalsal) was commonly practiced [in which] their love could shift back and forth from girl to boy and back to girl.”

In the court of Naser al-Din Shah, who ruled Persia from 1848 to 1896, keeping boy concubines was still an acceptable practice, and the shah himself (in addition to his wives and harem) had a young male lover, Malijak, whom he “loved more than anyone else.” In his memoirs, Malijak recalled proudly, “the king’s love for me reached the point where it is impossible for me to write about it… [He] held me in his arms and kissed me as if he were kissing one of his great beloveds.”

In a lengthy section of her book entitled “Toward a Westernized Modernity,” Afary demonstrates how the trend toward modernization which emerged during the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and which gave the Persian monarchy its first parliament was heavily influenced by concepts harvested from the West.

One of her most stunning revelations is how an Azeri-language newspaper edited and published in the Russian Caucuses, Molla Nasreddin (or MN, which appeared from 1906 to 1931) influenced this Iranian Revolution with a “significant new discourse on gender and sexuality,” sharing Marx’s well-documented contempt for homosexuals. With an editorial board that embraced Russian social democratic concepts, including women’s rights, MN was also “the first paper in the Shi’i Muslim world to endorse normative heterosexuality,” echoing Marx’s well-documented contempt for homosexuality. Afary writes that “this illustrated satirical paper, which circulated among Iranian intellectuals and ordinary people alike, was enormously popular in the region because of its graphic cartoons.”

MN conflated homosexuality and pedophilia, and attacked clerical teachers and leaders for “molesting young boys,” played upon feelings of “contempt” for passive homosexuals, suggested that elite men who kept amrad concubines “had a vested interested in maintaining the (male) homosocial public spaces where semi-covert pederasty was tolerated,” and “mocked the rites of exchanging brotherhood vows before a mollah and compared it to a wedding ceremony.” It was in this way that a discourse of political homophobia developed in Europe, which insisted that only heterosexuality could be the norm, was introduced into Iran.

MN’s attacks on homosexuality “would shape Iranian debates on sexuality for the next century,” and it “became a model for several Iranian newspapers of the era,” which echoed its attacks on the conservative clergy and leadership for homosexual practices. In the years that followed, “Iranian revolutionaries commonly berated major political figures for their sexual transgressions,” and “revolutionary leaflets accused adult men of having homosexual sex with other adult men, ‘of thirty-year-olds propositioning fifty-year-olds and twenty-year-olds propositioning forty-year-olds, right in front of the Shah.’ Some leaflets repeated the old allegation that major political figures had been amrads in their youth.”

Subsequently, “leading constitutionalists enthusiastically joined the campaign against homosexuality,” writes Afary, noting that “the influential journal Kaveh (1916-1921), published in exile in Berlin and edited by the famous constitutionalist Hasan Taqizadeh, had led the movement of opinion against homosexuality… Their notion of modernization now included the normalization of heterosexual eros and the abandonment of all homosexual practices and even inclinations.”

When Reza Kahn overthrew the monarchy’s Qajar dynasty and made himself shah in 1925, he ushered in a new wave of reforms and modernization that included attempts to outlaw homosexuality entirely and a ferocious – ultimately successful – assault on classical Persian poetry. Iraj Mirza, previously known for his homoerotic poems, “joined other leading political figures of this period in encouraging compulsory heterosexuality.” These politicians and intellectuals insisted that “true patriotism required switching one’s sexual orientation from boys to women… Other intellectuals and educators pressed for the elimination of poems with homosexual themes from school textbooks.”

Leading this crusade was a famous historian and prolific journalist, Ahmad Kasravi, “who helped shape many cultural and educational policies during the 1930s and 1940s.” Kasravi founded a nationalist movement, Pak Dini (Purity of Religion), which developed a broad following. An admirer of MN, Kasravi preached that “homosexuality was a measure of cultural backwardness,” that Sufi poets of homoeroticism led “parasitic” lives, and that their queer poetry “was dangerous and had to be eliminated.”

Kasravi’s Pak Dini movement “went so far as to institute a festival of book burning, held on winter solstice. Books deemed harmful and amoral were thrown into a bonfire in an event that seemed to echo the Nazi and Soviet-style notions of eliminating ‘degenerate’ art.” Eventually, Prime Minister Mahmoud Jam, who held office from 1935 to 1939, acceded to Kasravi’s demand that homoerotic poems be banned entirely from daily newspapers.

Kasravi “based his opposition to the homoeroticism of classical poetry on several assumptions. He expected the young generation to study Western sciences in order to rebuild the nation, and he regarded Sufi poetry as a dangerous diversion. As preposterous as it might sound, Kasravi also argued that the revival of Persian poetry was a grand conspiracy concocted by British and German Orientalists to divert the nation’s youth from the revolutionary legacy of the Constitutional Revolution and to encourage… immoral pursuits.”

Afary adds sorrowfully that “most supporters of women’s rights sympathized with Kasravi’s project because he encouraged the cultivation of monogamous, heterosexual love in marriage… In this period, neither Kasravi nor feminists distinguished between rape or molestation of boys and consensual same-sex relations between adults.”

The expansion of radio, television, and print media in the 1940s – including a widely read daily, Parcham, published from 1941 by Kasravi’s Pak Dini movement – resulted in a nationwide discussion about the evils of pederasty and, ultimately, in significant official censorship of literature. References to same-sex love and the love of boys were eliminated in textbooks and even in new editions of classical poetry. “Classical poems were now illustrated by miniature paintings celebrating heterosexual, rather than homosexual, love and students were led to believe that the love object was always a woman, even when the text directly contradicted that assumption,” Arafy writes.

In the context of a triumphant censorship that erased from the popular collective memory the enormous literary and cultural heritage of what Afary terms “the ethics of male love” in the classical Persian period, it is hardly surprising as Afary earlier noted in “Foucault and the Iranian Revolution” that the virulence of the current Iranian regime’s anti-homosexual repression stems in part from the role homosexuality played in the 1979 revolution that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers to power.

In that earlier work, she and her co-author, Kevin B. Anderson, wrote: “There is… a long tradition in nationalist movements of consolidating power through narratives that affirm patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality, attributing sexual abnormality and immorality to a corrupt ruling elite that is about to be overthrown and/or is complicit with foreign imperialism. Not all the accusations leveled against the [the deposed shah of Iran, and his] Pahlevi family and their wealthy supporters stemmed from political and economic grievances. A significant portion of the public anger was aimed at their ‘immoral’ lifestyle. There were rumors that a gay lifestyle was rampant at the court. The shah’s prime minister, Amir Abbas Hoveyda, was said to have been a homosexual. The satirical press routinely lampooned him for his meticulous attire, the purple orchid in his lapel, and his supposed marriage of convenience. The shah himself was rumored to be bisexual. There were reports that a close male friend of the shah from Switzerland, a man who knew him from their student days in that country, routinely visited him.

“But the greatest public outrage was aimed at two young, elite men with ties to the court who held a mock wedding ceremony. Especially to the highly religious, this was public confirmation that the Pahlevi house was corrupted with the worst kinds of sexual transgressions, that the shah was no longer master of his own house. These rumors contributed to public anger, to a sense of shame and outrage, and ultimately were used by the Islamists in their calls for a revolution.”

Soon after coming to power in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini established the death penalty for homosexuality.

In “Sexual Politics in Modern Iran,” Afary sums up the situation for homosexuals under the Ahmadinejad regime in this way: “While the shari’a [Islamic law] requires either the actual confession of the accused or four witnesses who observed them in flagrante delicto, today’s authorities look only for medical evidence of penetration in homosexual relationships. Upon finding such evidence, they pronounce the death sentence. Because execution of men on charges of homosexuality has prompted international outrage, the state has tended to compound these charges with others, such as rape and pedophilia. Continual use of these tactics has undermined the status of Iran’s gay community and attenuated public sympathy for them. Meanwhile, many Iranians believe that pedophilia is rampant in the religious cities of Qum and Mashad, including in the seminaries, where temporary marriage and prostitution are also pervasive practices.” (Full disclosure: in her section on gays in today’s Iran, Afary cites my reporting several times and thanks me in the book’s acknowledgements for sharing materials and insights with her.)

In this necessarily truncated summary of some of Afary’s most significant and nuanced findings and revelations with respect to homosexuality, it is impossible to do justice to the full sweep and scope of “Sexual Politics in Iran,” the larger part of which is devoted to the role of Iranian women, and to their struggles for freedom which began in the 19th century. But as Afary herself writes, “[F]or a very long time even talking about the pervasive homoeroticism of the region’s premodern culture had been labeled ‘Orientalism’… [but] increasingly I found that one could not simply talk about gender and women’s rights, particularly rights within marriage, without addressing the subject of same-sex relations.”

This she has done with uncommon sensitivity, intellectual rigor, engagement, subtlety, and skill.

And for that, both Iranian lesbians and gays and feminists in that nation owe Afary an enormous debt of gratitude, as do all of us concerned with sexual liberation for everyone worldwide

Gay activists like to mention that homosexual relations have been present throughout history. What they don’t tell you is that the homosexual relationships they refer to were largely pederastic in nature. Androphile homosexuality, that is, males who love other males of similar age, is largely a historical anomaly, but seems to be the prevalent standard in today’s western societies.

Starting in the 1960s, with the emergence of the civil rights movement, “gay” activists started shunning the pederastic aspect that had shaped homosexual relations throughout history. From the Greeks and the Persians to the men of the Renaissance and even the Uranian poets in 20th Century England, the love between a man and a boy was the norm. “Gay” activists, fueled maybe by the fear of being ostracized by the mainstream and feminist and egalitarian theories, ignored the pederastic component of homosexuality, to the point of completely changing the definition.

These activists linked sexual orientation with gender issues, thus allowing them to ignore boy-man relationships. By arguing that “gay” men had a different conception of gender, they equated a homosexual man to a heterosexual woman in terms of attraction. As such, condemnation for homosexuality ceased to be politically correct.

Gay relationships in the West have since become largely androphiliac in nature, and fueled by a link between gender and sexual orientation. Long gone are the times when it was acceptable for a young man (erastes) to establish a romantic relationship with an adolescent boy (eromenos), before the erastes got married (to a woman, of course). Pederastic relationships had no gender issues. The erastes was as manly as any.

He was of a superior status, worthy of the love of a boy (and viceversa). They were the leaders of their societies, and effeminacy was not tolerated. Loving a boy before getting married was the natural thing to do, and the only acceptable way of living if one was part of the elite.

The gay movement of the 60s changed the definition and created an anomaly that has no historical or natural basis, but that unfortunately is being widely regarded as the only possible form of homosexual love.

Race Course Against White Supremacy II

A Critique

by

R.E. Prindle

     There’s to be a new Supreme Court justice chosen.  The Great Black Hope says he wants someone with ‘empathy and understanding’. 

     I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or a footnote in a case book.

     I guess that means someone who will throw out the law book and play by the rules of  ‘love.’

     It is also about how any laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.’

     Yes, but which people?  Just some of them or all of them.  Affect their lives in what way?  Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric.  He got away with crap like this before the election but he shouldn’t be allowed to now.  What’s this?  Law we can believe in?

     What does this mean?  I can string words together but I mean, what does this mean?  For those of you who still can’t see it the Hope’s remarks could have come straight out of The Bomber and Bernie’s latest:  Race Course Against White Supremacy.  They talk the same language.  The connection between the Dynamic Duo and the Great Black Hope is totally obvious.

     So, we can interpret the Hope’s remarks to mean that whoever his choice is he will be against White Supremacy.  To be against White Supremacy in the books of the Hope and the Bomber means to deny Whites any rights at all.  That is what the Hope and the Bomber call change ‘we’, meaning they, can believe in.

     ‘Empathy and understanding’ obviously means special consideration for non-Whites.

     ‘I will seek someone  who understands ‘justice’ isn’t some abstract theory…’ means the Black notion of justice and/or the Communist notion of ’social justice’, while non-adherence to ’some abstract legal theory’ means any inconvenient law will be disregarded.  The operative word there is the contemptuous ’some.’  This Harvard trained lawyer has no respect for the law.

     ‘We’ should have the same attitude toward any laws that this Pederast Congress passes and the Hope signs.

     ‘We’ should follow the example of the Bomber and Bernie who in their book quote Henry David Thoreau:

     If the law is of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice…then I say break the law.’

     Empathy and understanding require it.  I say that in this case the Bomber gives good advice.