To the Reader: This file was created with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. It has been edited to correct scanning errors, though some may still remain. We regret any inconvenience. Errors in the original pages are marked inside angle-brackets (<>). Some corrections are made (<ARCHIVIST'S CORRECTION: >), some comments added (<ARCHIVIST'S NOTE: >), other errors, mostly typographical and spelling, are marked <sic> to indicate that this is how they appeared in the original, and a few mysteries are marked <?>. Researchers are encouraged to consult the originals or the full-page copies available here when accuracy is needed for quotes or other scholarly use. ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.1 ------------------------------------ KALOS -- ON GREEK LOVE Vol.1, No.1, Spring 1976 Copyright © 1976 by COMITIA. All reproduction rights reserved. Written permission must be given for review, quotation or reprint. Address correspondence, subscriptions and manuscripts to Comitia, P.O. Box 7071, Arlington, Virginia, U.S.A., 22207. Editor, J.Z. Eglinton Scientific / Technical Editor, Dr. Warren Johansson Chief Editor / Publisher, Eric Lindfors Cover Drawing: "Ganymede," by Sidney Smith CONTENTS 2 Pedophile Politics 9 The Florentine Medici 16 Definition - A Short Story 19 Sufi Poetry -- Boy-Love and the Divine 26 Hypocrisy at any Price -- Boys for Sale 32 Were the Bulgars "Buggers"? 34 Varia Introducing a New Journal . . . KALOS is a new journal with the aim of publishing scholarly material (including, but not limited to, anthropological, historical, sociological, literary, critical and educational articles) centered around the theme of Greek Love, which is the love between man and boy, or between older and younger boy. No political position is inherent in KALOS's editorial content, save our view that surviving anti-sexual and age-of-consent laws are generally unjust to a class of innocent persons. We cannot condone continuance of repressive measures. Though KALOS will occasionally publish fiction, poetry of unusual merit (including translations), and a very few personal reminiscences, its primary focus remains scholarly. -J.Z. Eglinton . . . To Our Readers We at KALOS wish to invite readers and authors to send in their comments, suggestions or articles, or materials which might be used in articles or as background. Any writer is also invited to submit a precis or idea-line for an article, if he is not certain of its appropriateness for KALOS or would first wish to learn if we can use it. Materials sent us for possible publication should, preferably, be typed, only on one side of each page and double-spaced. Kindly use wide margins, with only about 50 characters per line. Good -- and certainly scholarly -- presentation of any article also requires that all sources and references used in preparation of that article, or which might clarify some particular point, be included as footnotes or notations. Greek Love is far too important for articles on its history, literature or whatever to be left unverified or unsupported. The vast majority of publications purporting to represent Greek Love, from the photo-magazines to most of the less-objectionable presentations, are often mere chimeras and effluvia of rhetoric in these times of most pressing need for verification of statements on the subject. Greek Love requires facts, not opinion, to verify and substantiate its claims. This issue of KALOS should give you some idea of the publication we have worked so very hard and long to achieve. Suggestions for additional approaches and areas of research will be appreciated. --Eric Lindfors ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.2 ------------------------------------ Pedophile Politics Humphrey Barton, Belfast, Northern Ireland The London Sunday People's recent expose of the aims and activities of the London-based Paedophile Action for Liberation (PAL)<note 1> group, opens what threaten to become running sores in the tentative development of pedophile (and particularly homosexual pedophile, or pederast) consciousness in the United Kingdom. The front-page story, under the giveaway headline "The Vilest Men in Britain,"<note 2> served to support the conventional, stereotyped view of pedophiles as sick, depraved individuals. (Such a viewpoint can easily arouse less liberal -- though otherwise mild-tempered -- persons to petition for at the least the return of hanging, or better, the castration of such offenders.) Precisely why pedophilia conventionally produces this response is an interesting question and one which requires more sober consideration than it has traditionally attracted, if the phenomenon is to be adequately understood and prevailing societal reaction to it justified, or possibly questioned. Two primary questions which need to be asked if any serious public education campaign is to be got under way are simply: "What do we know about pedophilia and pedophiles?" and, secondly, "What, on the basis of this information, should be done?" I This first query, fundamental though it is, has rarely been raised in the course of recent, intermittent enquiry into the efficacy of the laws relating to the age of sexual consent. What empirical research has been done suffers in a variety of respects, notably in its reliance upon information from convicted and jailed respondents.<note 3> Useful though such information is in building up a composite picture of the failed pedophile, the man most likely to end up in prison as a result of his sexual orientation, there is a suspicion that data of this kind provide only a small part of what is perhaps a larger and more complex situation. Indeed, throughout the literature recurs the suggestion that the number of potential pedophiles in society is larger than commonly supposed, and that figures given in criminal statistics possibly represent only the tip of an unexpectedly sizeable iceberg. 2 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.3 ------------------------------------ Another repeated finding concerns the damaging consequences of court proceedings for child victims of pedophile offenses.<note 4> Some years ago, the sociologist Michael Schofield reported that: There is a growing feeling that the present legal procedure causes unnecessary suffering to the child victim of a sexual assault. Isolated events are unlikely to have a profound effect on a child and he would soon forget about sexual interference if it were not for the significance given to it by parental concern and legal proceedings.<note 5> Only the most sporadic evidence can be adduced to suggest that this situation has altered significantly in this respect over the past decade. In all this, however, the stress is on the convicted pedophile. Little work has been done which might offer some hints as to the motives and meanings of the pedophile act outside the legal framework with all the contaminating implications of moral guilt associated with, and engendered by it. Quite apart from the emotive and often highly misleading use of terms like victim and assault, there is a tendency to automatically subsume all manifestations of pedophile attention under the generic classification of child molestation, a legal telescoping which hardly serves to clarify the intricate issues involved. A third source of possible distortion in available sources lies with the emphasis on the more obviously sordid manifestations of pedophilia: on sexual violence, rape and child-murder. Though clearly any examination of pedophilia and the societal response to it will need to take such horrific aspects into account, their over-emphasis may serve to obscure its more common and less overtly harmful guises. Of course, it is often precisely these aspects which bring the existence of the pedophile to the attention of the rest of the community; hence the growing literature on, and concern over, the specific problem of pederast prostitution and solicitation.<note 6> That this form of exploitation possibly represents only the extreme limit of a much wider social spectrum has, as yet, been insufficiently considered by researchers and public officials alike. Certainly, dubious techniques such as those used in the closing minutes of the British television documentary Johnny Go Home ("More kids are coming to London and they're getting younger every year.")<note 7> serve only to raise more questions than they satisfactorily resolve if left at the level of pessimistic speculation. Our existing knowledge of pedophilia, its motives, meanings and manifestations, is inadequate for a variety of reasons. Before moral judgements of the kind explicit in, and traded upon, by the Sunday People's expose of the PAL group are made, it might be advisable to be Pedophile Politics 3 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.4 ------------------------------------ in possession of information less biased and more reliable than we have at present. We don't yet have the answers needed for this quite simply because we haven't known what questions to ask. II On my second point -- What should be done? -- a number of issues present themselves for consideration. Clearly, the prevailing public reaction to the pedophile, and even to the suspicion of his existence in the community, is a hostile one. Exactly whether, and if so how, this response might be beginning to alter with the emergence of new forms of adult sexual partnership is an open question. There are some indications that the private response is becoming more tolerant. The proportion of parents who rush for the protection of the law on finding out what exactly their thirteen-year-old son was up to with Uncle Charles on that camping trip is probably less than it might have been some years ago. Yet, relations of pedophile groups with organizations more generally concerned with homosexual law reform are still, if anything, more difficult. Britain's Gay News, which expertly followed up the People's PAL story<note 8> distanced itself from more specific pedophile aims: "We have no mandate from our members to get the age-of-consent reduced to less than sixteen." That this situation of uneasy co-existence should exist is, perhaps, predictable given the greater likelihood of the adoption of CHE's parliamentary proposals (Committee for Homosexual Equality<note 9>) and clearly no one is going to prejudice that opportunity. Homosexual law reform groups will, however, have to consider the linkage of their aims with those of pedophile organizations as these become more numerous and increasingly vocal. If the caricature of the pedophile as a sick, evil, raincoat-clad folk-devil who lurks around school playgrounds is on the way out, and indications are that it is, then the next stereotype to go may be that of the guilt-ridden, furtive person who keeps his sexual preferences strictly secret. Twenty years ago, Donald West could observe that: The paedophiliacs' [sic] sexual outlets are comparatively infrequent, unsatisfying and guilt-ridden, remaining secret episodes known only to themselves, and out of keeping with the general tenor of their lives. Whereas many homosexuals question the assumptions of conventional morality, homosexual paedophiliacs tend to compartmentalize their thinking, assuming attitudes of impregnable respectability and sexual purity, hardly admitting their real interests and motives even to themselves.<note 10> 4 KALOS 1/1 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.5 ------------------------------------ Since 1955, some cracks have begun to appear in this picture and indications of the emergence of a specifically pedophile awareness are beginning to appear. Parker Rossman<note 11>, an American researcher, and one of the few to have based his studies on interviews with guilt-free pedophiles, suggests that, far from maintaining this scenario of guilt-tinged insecurity, some pedophiles in the U.S.A. are increasingly seeking to defend and justify their sexual orientation. In the United Kingdom, apart from PAL, the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE)<note 12> circulates a well-produced newsletter and, in the U.S.A., newsletters like Hermes, based in Chicago, and Better Life Monthly ("An educational service organization serving the interests of pedophiles worldwide.") serve as a focus for pedophile interest and provide a means whereby pedophiles can meet and communicate with each other. As to available strategies and tactics for enabling, in the words of PAL's stated aims, "paedophiles to live reasonably secure and adjusted lives in our hostile society by providing them with information and support, while fostering social and legal change in the United Kingdom," a variety of options is open. In the foreground is the question of the legally established age-of-consent. That the present laws are unsatisfactorily anomalous and occasionally downright eccentric seems clear. Nor are these dead-letter laws: Every month, men are convicted for having sex with consenting youths under the age of twenty-one. In October, 1974, Mr. Justice Swanwick jailed twenty-six-year-old Peter Gabbitas for eighteen months at a British Crown Court for corrupting a sixteen-year-old boy with whom Gabbitas was then living, despite this being his first conviction on any homosexual charge.<note 13> Of course, pedophile acts with even younger boys present heightened problems: Social and legal stigma against pedophilia increase rapidly as the age of the boy is lowered. One bogey which will have to be confronted is the problem of youthful seduction as a factor in subsequent homosexualization. As far back as 1957, the Wolfenden Report on Homosexual Offenses had accepted that: "Seduction has little effect in inducing a settled pattern of homosexual behaviour," and noted significantly that: It is a widely held view, and one which found favour among our police and legal witnesses, that seduction in youth is the decisive factor in the production of homosexuality as a condition. We have found no convincing evidence in support of this contention.<note 14> The Speijer Committee, which reported to the Dutch Government in 1969, reached the conclusion that "there is no reason to suppose that homosexual seduction is more harmful than heterosexual seduction."<note 15> Pedophile Politics 5 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.6 ------------------------------------ And more recently, Dr. F.E. Kenyon, in a British Medical Association booklet, Homosexuality, has noted that: "It is most unlikely that a normally developing child from a secure and well-adjusted home background could have its whole course of development altered by limited homosexual encounters." All of which may be fine in theory. Any campaign, however, which sought to educate public opinion on pedophilia would have to consider the relative immunity of that opinion to alteration through presentation of factual evidence. As Alan Ryan has observed: We may put a utilitarian gloss on our disapproval of children being used as sex partners, but we are more or less deaf to contradictory psychological or physiological evidence.<note 16> Nevertheless, recent moves to have the Wolfenden measures reconsidered are assured of some measure of support. Also CHE's draft Sexual Offences Bill recommends that the age-of-homosexual-consent be lowered to sixteen to bring it into line with the law relating to heterosexual consent. The evidence presented to the Wolfenden Committee by the Church of England's Moral Welfare Council recommended age seventeen; and one motion at last year's CHE Whitsun Conference called for the lowering of the age-of-homosexual-consent to twelve; and last year's report of the Sexual Law Reform Society (SLRS), chaired by Bishop John Robinson, came out in favor of age fourteen. Whatever the next step is, two points actively considered by the SLRS in their report may yet prove of specific relevance to the laws governing pedophilia in the United Kingdom. One is the suggestion that the only honest way out of this welter of hair-splitting argument is to abolish the age-of-consent completely, and employ the care and control provisions of the British Children and Young Persons Act up to the age of legal majority. This would still allow prosecution for physical assault, but not for non-violent consensual relations between adult and child. The other is the recognition that the label of sexual assault is little more than a legal convenience when minors are involved. An alternative would be to treat all assaults as violent, recognizing that addition of the word sexual serves only to stoke the fires of prejudice. Taken together, these two moves would serve to both keep children out of the courts and to effectively decriminalize borderline cases of consensual sexual relations across the age-of-consent. 6 KALOS 1/1 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.7 ------------------------------------ III Sexual law reform of any sort is always a highly emotionally charged issue, and exponents of reform in the particularly sensitive area of pedophile behavior are, like PAL, going to risk being kicked about in the gutterpress, if not into the gutter. In the possibly not-so-long term, moves to educate public opinion on the issue may have to focus less on destroying old prejudices and dismantling old stereotypes and to concentrate more attention on that beneficial and supportive role of adult-child relations which some societies other than ours have traditionally considered less automatically problematic.<note 17> Certainly more research is required: into the precise meaning of consent in adolescent and pre-adolescent children, for instance, and into the ambivalence of current ideas about child molestation and assault. When, for example, does affection cease to be socially acceptable -- indeed mandatory -- and become seduction? The question will require a more rational kind of dialogue between involved parties -- teachers, social workers, members of children's liberation groups -- than has characterized the debate so far, not least in the deceitful and unhelpful sensationalism of the Sunday People. All of this sounds, perhaps, a little far off in the future, yet social and legal sexual reform during the last twenty years have occurred, and possibly overtaken us at an unprecedented rate. Hitherto-unmentioned areas of sexual activity will become more open and accepted in the next two decades. NOTES I. PAL is a counselling and befriending group for British pedophiles. Its newsletter Palaver contains regular articles on the problems of pedophile identity in a sexist society. 2. Sunday People. London: May 25, 1975. According to the article, which devoted almost three pages to "an inquiry that will shock every mum and dad," the aims of PAL came out as: "The group's obnoxious interests are. . . to seduce young children of both sexes." The article used phrases like "the most vile, shameless gang in Britain; . . . bizarre, perverted sex-ring; . . . the vile child-fanciers of PAL." 3. For instance, Michael Schofield's Sociological Aspects of Homosexuality. London: Longmans and Co., 1965. 4. See T.C.N. Gibbens and J. Prince, Child Victims of Sex Offenses. London: Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency, 1963. Also, Matti Virkkunen, "Victim-Precipitated Pedophilia Offenses," British Journal of Criminology, Vol.15, No.2, April 1975, pp.175-180. Pedophile Politics 7 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.8 ------------------------------------ 5. Schofield, Michael, "Child Molesters." London: New Society, October 14, 1965. The material cited in this article was later incorporated into Schofield's Sociological Aspects of Homosexuality, op.cit. 6. For example, Dennis Drew and Jonathan Drake, Boys for Sale -- A Study of the Prostitution of Young Boys for Sexual Purposes. New York: Brown Book Company, 1969. Also, Dennis Harmon (ed.), Boy Lovers. New York: Jumeaux Press, 1969; or M. Harris, The Dilly Boys. London: Croom Helm, 1973; or Robin Lloyd, For Money, or Love -- Boy Prostitution in America. New York: Vanguard, 1976. 7. This two-part documentary program on teenage runaways and the alleged dangers of pederast prostitution in London was broadcast by Yorkshire Television on July 22, 1975. Directed by John Willis, it ran for two hours and told of the dangers and the "horrific and scarcely credible plight of an estimated 30,000 young homeless who arrive in London every year." The film ended with scenes of a "little ten-year-old runaway. He was found in Soho. He looked so beautiful and innocent, but could easily be corrupted." 8. Gay News. London: No. 72, June 5-18, 1975. 9. The Committee for Homosexual Equality (CHE) is the largest national gay-liberation organization in the United Kingdom. 10. West, Donald J., Homosexuality. London: G. Duckworth & Co., 1955, p.119. This book has a very useful bibliography. 11. Rossman, Parker, "The Pederasts," Society/Transactions. March-April, 1973. Rutgers University Press. See also his Pederasty -- Sexual Experiences Between Men and Boys. New York: Association Press, 1976 (forthcoming). 12. Pedophile Information Exchange (PIE) is a group working on reform programs as well as providing information for its members. Another group, the Schweizerische Arbeitsgruppe Pedophilie (SAP) is similar in organization and purpose. This latter organization operates in Switzerland and West Germany. 13. See Philip Jordan, "Fears Behind a Minor Problem." London: The Guardian, January 9, 1975. 14. Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offence and Prostitution. Command 247. London: HMSO (Her Majesty's Stationery Office), 1957. (The HMSO is similar to the U.S. Government Printing Office.) 15. See Philip Jordan, "Fears Behind a Minor Problem," op.cit. More recently, Dagens Nyheter (The Daily News), Sweden's leading daily newspaper, has called for the abolition of the age-of-consent on the grounds that a law which is so often contravened might just as well be done away with. 16. Ryan, Alan, "Two Kinds of Morality," London: New Society, April 3, 1975. 17. Two useful comments from the American educational writer John Holt may be mentioned in this respect. His Escape from Childhood -- The Needs and Rights of Children. London: Penguin (paperback), 1975; and Freedom and Beyond, London: Penguin (paperback), 1972. Both provide convincing arguments for the reassessment of societal attitudes to childhood and to childhood-sexuality. See also Robert Ollendorf's <ARCHIVIST'S CORRECTION: Ollendorff's> "The Rights of Adolescents" in Childrens' Rights -- Towards the Liberation of the Child, London: Elek Books, 1971. 8 KALOS 1/1 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.9 ------------------------------------ The Florentine Medici Jonathan Drake, Beirut, Lebanon Most of the more explicit history books pass disapprovingly over the personal lives of the Medici dynasty and their imitators among Florentines of the Renaissance, courtly and common. A few refer to the successive rulers as corrupt or licentious or immoral, leaving it to readers' imaginations to decide whether they debauched children, "with lecherous howls/ Deflowered young owls," practiced incest in group orgies, indulged in the kind of activities which later inspired such worthies as the Marquis de Sade, or reveled with hashish brought by some traveler from the Mysterious East. I Two books, in particular, give a somewhat better clue, one excellent, the other disappointing; the one devoted to an overview of Florentine culture, particularly during the Renaissance, the other specifically to the scandalous details of Medici private lives, with more than one glance back to earlier times. The former is Mary McCarthy's The Stones of Florence<note 1>; the latter is Luca Ombrosi's vita dei Medici Sodomiti.<note 2> The "A.C." who prefaces Ombrosi's book (certainly not Aleister Crowley) says that it was prudent of the author to remain anonymous until the present post-Kinsey, post-Jean Genet epoch, when the public would no longer be scandalized to learn the truth about public figures. In any event, among the glances back are those at the too-familiar Knights Templar, Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem (better known as Knights of Malta) and Teutonic Knights, military orders all whose members appear to have discovered boy-love -- and what Dukahz<note 3> calls boysexuality -- in the Middle East, much as did French colonial officers in Indo-China, North Africa and the Levant in more recent times. But much of the scandal concerning the military knightly orders was a calculated smear on them forming part of the usual accusations of heresy and witchcraft, based apparently on discoveries that some of the secret rituals of these orders were of the nature of ritual magic. 9 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.10 ------------------------------------ There is also the mention of Alfonso of Naples (1442) with his troop of beautiful young pages, Henry III and his minions, Michelangelo, and Sodoma -- the usual persons of the period. (See the Hirschfeld Jahrbuch<note 4> for those less well known . The book's major interest, for me anyway, was in some material not covered by Miss McCarthy, relating to a certain Gian Gastone de' Medici, born 1671, son of Cosimo III. Of this man and his boyfriends more below. Exposes, such as Ombrosi's, occasionally have their uses in turning up events otherwise forgotten. II McCarthy, however, in a scintillating, many-sided study of the interrelationship of Florentine cultural patterns with Florentine arts, gives us more understanding in less space. "In any virile society, boys become objects of desire," she writes (p.95), "and the passionate, intellectual Florentines were nearly as susceptible as the Athenians." The love of boys was common throughout Europe during the Renaissance, when after the depressing, intellectually sterile years of the Middle Ages men reawoke to a new zeal for life and joy -- a zeal inspired largely by rediscovery of ancient Roman, later also ancient Greek, manuscripts and artworks, adumbrating a guiltlessly sensual life-style hitherto undreamed of. Renaissance intelligentsia -- and after them political leaders, artists, common people -- turned to the Greek philosophers for inspiration. They assumed naturally that strong, self-confident men will take what they want, nor will they fear to admit the charms of boys as well as women. It is probably significant, also, that these ancient documents had come to Renaissance Europe in expanding trade from Arabic sources, which had not only preserved and copied and circulated them, but also learned much from them -- among other things the keeping of charming boys as favorites or, in some cases, as harem bedfellows. McCarthy traces the proclivity of Florentines for boys back into the Middle Ages, saying that it was deeply ingrown then and far from "unnatural." Medieval hermits in the Casentino battled "with flail and psalter" against the "impure spirits" that tempted them in the shape of boys. St. Romualdo, founder of the white-robed Camaldolese Order, even as an old man had to do penance for sodomy (for which read succumbing to some boy's fleshly charms) at Styria, near Fonte Avellana. And in the next generation, we find St. Giovanni Gualberto contending against the same sin in the Vallombrosan Forest (pp.94-95). She refers to these worthies as "virile reformers," rural John the Baptist figures, "epic heroes." Ironically, the Camaldolese monastery, later the 10 KALOS 1/1 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.11 ------------------------------------ site of the Florentine Academy, was begun by boy-loving Lorenzo de' Medici with Leon Battista Alberti and Cristoforo Landino for Platonic philosophical discussions. Despite all this, the Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici passed stern laws against sodomy (i.e., boy-love) and bestiality; but from the available evidence, this would seem to have been a sop to churchly tongue-waggers, expecially <sic> the fanatic Savonarola, although his own sculpture collection testifies where his interests lay: This included suggestive works by Benvenuto Cellini -- himself once in trouble with the authorities for the same reason -- and Bandinelli: two Ganymedes, a Narcissus, a Hyacinthus, and (so much for bestiality!) a Leda.<note 5> Whether one assumes, with Magnus Hirschfeld and others of his generation, that there was a hereditary weakness in that direction, or that there was a culture-wide tolerance in the clan, the Medici family included an unusually large number of known boy-lovers. McCarthy says (p.94) that it ran in the family, like gout, but she vitiates her own argument by associating it with some kind of degeneration, with an ever-commoner and increasing effeminacy until their "uncontrollable aversion to women" caused the extinction of the line: "Heirs grew fewer and weaker till finally none at all could be got from fat Gian Gastone." In France, it cropped out in Catarina de' Medici's son, Henri III, who appeared at the fete at Chenonceaux, in honor of his own accession to the kingship (1589), dressed in women's clothes. This is the same Henri III who practically legitimized boy-love in France, making it fashionable in his court in the 1590's by publicly parading his succession of pretty-faced boyfriends. Naturally, his courtiers of rank, high and low, were not slow to copy the practice, perhaps the sooner in an epoch when the throne of England was occupied by a sexually ambiguous queen (soon to leave her throne to an effeminate boy-loving James I), and when Pope after Pope filled the court with faintly scandalized titters over boy favorites. The locus classicus among the Medici of Florence, however, seems to have been the table of Lorenzo il Magnifico. Here at Palazzo Medici, as much as in Plato's Symposium which it so effectively aped boy-love -- idealized or sensual, it did not matter -- was taken for granted. Here the young Michelangelo met the humanist Poliziano: resident tutor to Lorenzo's handsome sons, bitterly jealous of the Grand Duke's wife Clarice Orsini on the grounds that she interfered between Poliziano and the two boys! This same Poliziano is recorded as having -- according to his enemies -- died "of a fit of amorous fever" while playing a love song on the lute for one of his pupils. For which read that he probably had a Florentine Medici 11 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.12 ------------------------------------ stroke or a fatal heart attack while in old age straining for a high note. (Extant Renaissance Italian vocal music is clearly not intended for the lazy, the untrained, or the out-of-practice.) Michelangelo, universally admired and much imitated despite his personal ugliness and extremely slovenly habits, could be the subject of many pages of reminiscence here or elsewhere; but read instead the material on his proclivities in, for example, Greek Love<note 6>, Chapter XIII. Even his sculpture was, then as later, recognized for its boy-loving significance. McCarthy quotes an unnamed Florentine on the loose, soft, white curves of the "Bacchus" (now also in the Bargello): "Michelangelo non avrebbe potuto peccare di piu col cesello." -- "Michelangelo could not have sinned more with the chisel." Eglinton has remarked also on the "Victory" of 1532 among many other Michelangelo sculptures, as here not only is his own face represented as the victim, but a pretty and unfortunately not too intelligent-looking teenaged boy is the victor, usually identified as Tommaso de' Cavalieri, whom the sculptor had recently met in Rome. Michelangelo, by the bye, complained to a Florentine businessman about a boy the latter had recently sent him as a servant; McCarthy quotes the merchant's reply to the effect that the sculptor might as well have taken the boy to bed, since he was at least good looking, even if good for nothing else, and she adds: "The businessman was simply being practical." (pp.95-96) Aside from Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, she speaks of the proclivity as manifested in the art of Verrocchio, of madman Giacopo Pontormo (1498-1557) and his Mannerist successors (a style for long "official" in Florence under later Medici) and at somewhat greater length of its oddly uneven appearance in the sculptures of Donatello. Though his personal life appears to have been free of scandal -- which may mean either that he did not allow his interest in boys to go as far as the bedroom (though it certainly got to his studio), especially considering that he lived for many years with his mother, or more likely that he was very discreet in his choice of companions -- his "David", naked except for a girlish bonnet and a pair of fancy, polished high boots, is what McCarthy calls "a transvestite's and fetichist's dream of alluring ambiguity," no plump, flabby effeminate, but a "provocative coquette of a boy."(p.95) Many of this master's other sculptures evidently depicted young, uninhibited faunets, and no Roman was ever so sensual in marble or bronze. There is also something of the same quality in Verrocchio's bronze "David" (with either of these one can understand Jonathan's passion!) -- the same Verrocchio some of whose 12 KALOS 1/1 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.13 ------------------------------------ female heads are so boyish as to be ambiguous aside from the headdress, and so like those of the young Leonardo as to render their true origin long a matter of dispute. Nor did Florentine painters tire of depicting pretty boys. As this is a recurrent feature even in political paintings, it is clear that the Medici fashion was not to be ignored lightly. Perhaps unlike other times and places, the chief charms of these boys -- save in portraits when as always eyes, lips and hair are emphasized -- appear to have been firm, round buttocks and well-turned legs. McCarthy speaks of the legion of numerous young pages, always with those "wonderfully turned, strong, sturdy legs." Far from being effete, these boys are always painted as having a vitality, a masculine charm, despite their pink cheeks and their slightly damp-looking, neat rows of golden curls "as though . . . just come from the hairdresser" (p.98). These legs are theorized by McCarthy as representing a "resilient male principle of action" in contrast to the femininity of hands in Florentine painting. "The boy of fashion was glorified here in Florence as nowhere else in the world, and for the ordinary, mundane Florentine, lust might light as well on a lovely boy as on a young woman," says McCarthy (pg.95). Small wonder, then, that the anti-Medici historian Segni tells -- in a quite matter-of-fact way, not as anything scandalous -- the story of the equally anti-Medici banker Filippo Strozzi, who was sent by the Republic of Pisa to stand guard over the two young Medici bastards, Ippolito and Alessandro, prisoners or hostages in the Signory's custody. These boys were of just the right ages, and what one might have expected to happen in fact did. Fillippo, <ARCHIVIST'S CORRECTION: Filippo (see above and below, in this paragraph)> instead of continuing to play the sentry, went off alone with young Ippolito to a fort near Livorno (Leghorn), and before long not only Ippolito, but his brother alike were allowed to escape. Filippo was blamed for showing too much indulgence to Ippolito, "who was beautiful to look at and in the bloom of youth," but the censure was not too severe for the weakness was regarded as natural! The tradition continued despite the Counter-Reformation, for we find, at the turn of the 17th-18th Century, Gian Gastone I, son of Cosimo III, the last Grand Duke, always seen with his retinue of pretty boy valets: one German, one Milanese, one from Parma, eventually others as these grew up or were displaced from His Highness' favor. The one about whom most is recorded (by Ombrosi), Giuliano Dami, began as a farm workboy, nightly going to the city to collect dung for fertilizer, and later working in kitchens, until he found that his face might be his fortune, becoming a "charming whore" for master after master, going from nobleman to higher-ranking nobleman until he managed to attract Florentine Medici 13 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.14 ------------------------------------ the attention of Gian Gastone de' Medici. Beginning at the bottom of the list of boys at the Palazzo Pitti, Giuliano schemed to endear himself to the Grand Duke partly by discrediting the latter's German valet, partly by other means playing specifically on the ruler's weakness. When the German boy was sent back home in perhaps undeserved disgrace, Giuliano became chief servant to the bedchamber and he augmented his income and his status by procuring other boys for Gian Gastone. Ombrosi records as one typical instance of this pair's "corrupting the whole court" Giuliano's bringing the Grand Duke a 14-year-old orphan boy who wished a pension. Faced with a refusal, the boy danced and played a little French flute; presumably he displayed a pair of those same well-turned legs in his dancing, for Gian Gastone "kept the boy with him for several hours" (p.95), invited him to the palace and finally gave him a pension several times larger than he had originally begged for. Pandering this might be, but one cannot help thinking that the orphan at least went home knowing that he would not starve. III We have seen that boy-love, modelled sometimes on the Roman, sometimes perhaps on the true Greek, patterns, became and remained a fad, and more than a fad, for some two hundred years of the Medici dynasty in the Florentine city-state, spreading elsewhere in Italy and thence through Europe west and north. We have seen that a fad sponsored by rulers was taken up, for better or worse, by common people, and celebrated in the arts of the day. Today, we see a generation of young people beginning to emulate the Italian and French Renaissance in dress, hair-style and preoccupations (the guitar replacing the ubiquitous lute of the Florentine and Venetian peak periods, to be sure), with a guiltfree sensuality becoming ever commoner. The only questions remaining: Can we expect a cascade of technically expert creative figures in many different artforms now as then the Italian city-states had? And can we expect a renewed appreciation of boys on the part of the more fearless among Establishment fashionmakers? In short, is history beginning to repeat itself? NOTES 1. McCarthy, Mary, The Stones of Florence. New York: Harcourt, Brace, no date, circa 1958-9. Page citations are from the hard-cover edition, which is magnificently illustrated, and which, though out-of-print, is still available in some bookshops. The paperback reprint lacks too many of the illustrations. 14 KALOS 1/1 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.15 ------------------------------------ (Ed. Note: This book was also published by William Heinemann, Ltd., London. Also not dated, but apparently it appeared before the Harcourt, Brace edition.) 2. Ombrosi, Luca, Vita dei Medici Sodomiti. Roma: Canesi, no date. No English translation is known to me. (Ed. Note: The author of this article gave no page citations for this book.) 3. Dukahz, Casimir, The Asbestos Diary. N.Y.: Oliver Layton Press, 1965. (Ed. Note: A second novel by this author has been published, but to date only in German: Knabenliebe, tr. Peter Wolff. Frankfurt am Main: Joseph Melzer Verlag, 1971. Wolff's translation is uncommonly good, especially when one considers the author's great linguistic creativity in English.) <ARCHIVIST'S NOTE: Knabenliebe has been published in English as "Vice Versa", New York and London: Coltsfoot Press, 1976, ISBN 0-917372-01-8> 4. Hirschfeld, Magnus. See his Jahrbuch fur Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, (1899- 1923 and its successor, the Vierteljahresberichte. (Ed. Note: Both are very rare, but we understand that the University of Munich Library and the Library of Congress have complete or near-complete collections. See also his Die Homosexualitat des Mannes und des Weibes, Berlin, 1914. For a more complete discussion of Hirschfeld, see J.Z. Eglinton, Greek Love, pp.447-8.) 5. Ed. Note: All of these are still to be seen on the third floor of the Bargello, Florence, unless they perished in the 1966 floods. 6. Eglinton, J.Z., Greek Love. New York: Oliver Layton Press, 1964, 1965; or Hamburg: Gala Verlag, 1967; London: Neville Spearman, 1971. (Ed. Note: The book has also been remaindered and as such is available from several sources, such as Elysian Fields, N.Y., and perhaps from others. As an interesting note on the German edition, we understand that, when the Federal Government of West Germany banned the book, they did make the comment that, while they considered the book of possible "danger" to the morals of the F.R.G., they did not think it possible anyhow for one person to have written it, and certainly not a North American! Alas, they were wrong on both points.) Florentine Medici 15 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.16 ------------------------------------ Definition -- A Short Story Casimir Dukahz, U.S.A. Every moment spent with Joey is a time of delight and subtle torment. At the drive-in movie the boy leaned against me throughout the rather hackneyed film titled "Honeymoon," he visibly aroused by the torrid bed-scenes and the bride's huge mammary development, while I kept my hands locked about the steering-wheel, knuckles showing white beneath the strained flesh. During the second feature -- an exciting saga of a bank robber -- Joey sat upright, alert, consuming his bag of popcorn and a half of mine and pointing out with alarming accuracy the mistakes of the celluloid felon that led to his apprehension, conviction and sentence of 10-to-20 years at hard labor. "That guy was a way-out jerk," the boy said afterward as we stopped at a curb-service for hamburgers and malts. "The bank robber? Of course -- they never get away with it." "I bet I could! You just have to think of every angle and plan for it." Joey is almost 16 -- the age when anything is possible, even probable. I drove home slowly. It was a perfect June night -- full moon in a clear star-spangled sky, the languorous scent of clover and lilac wafting through the open windows. Joey turned on the radio to a rock-and-roll station and his slim brown hand, hard but seemingly soft and boneless, beat out the rhythm on the seat between us. My right hand was impelled from the wheel, hovered above his . . . and returned. I never touch him if I can help it. "There's the turn-off for Lovers' Lane, Duke," the boy said suddenly. Let's go in!" My breath caught in my throat. "Why?" Joey grinned. "We might see something interesting!" "Better not disturb them," I said heavily. "People wouldn't go there unless they didn't have a better place to . . . make love." "Yeah, I guess you're right. I know I wouldn't want to be disturbed if I was there. Can you imagine loving it up in the back seat of a Volkswagen, Duke?" I could -- almost too vividly. The jungle thump and wail of teen-age music was replaced by classical excerpts and the yearning wondering cry of young Cherubino in the operatic aria intruded to haunt me: 16 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.17 ------------------------------------ "You who have known it -- Tell, what is Love?" I have not known it, Cherubino, so I cannot help you. Sorry -- for you and for me. As we began to encounter the heavier traffic on the outskirts of the city, Joey said: "I don't want to go home yet, Duke. Go on to your place." At the house, the boy confesses he is hungry again and I scramble eggs and make cocoa while he manages the toaster. "How come you never got married, Duke?" he asks, biting into lavishly buttered toast with gusto. His teeth are strong, well-shaped, white -- but what a time I have getting him to the dentist to keep them that way! "I . . . don't really know, Joey. In my twenties there never seemed to be money enough; in my thirties, I never seemed to have time. Now. . ." I shrugged. "Don't you like girls?" My gaze dropped before the frank appraisal in his large, direct eyes. It is difficult to make much from that clear, judging inspection. "I suppose I do. But now there are so many other things to occupy me . . . books, music, plays, my work . . ." "And helping me." He shoved his cup across for more cocoa. "Have I helped you, Joey?" "Hell, you know you have! I was practically a dropout when I met you a year ago. Then you got me into technical school and made me stay there. Next year I'll be apprentice airplane mechanic -- it's what I've always wanted, but I'd never've stuck to it if it wasn't for you. Jeez, you sweat over my lessons more than I do!" "I enjoyed it, Joey -- more than I can tell you." "You've done a lot for me, Duke. More than anybody else -- more than my old man or maybe even my mother if she had lived. You buy me clothes, take me places, give me spending-money . . . but you never let me try to pay you back; you don't even let me help you around the house." "It wasn't necessary, Joey; a cleaning-woman comes in twice a week." I looked at my watch. "It's getting late . . . I'd better be taking you home." The boy stacked the dirty dishes in the sink. "I think I'll stay here tonight, Duke. You don't mind, do you?" I hesitated. This was something new for which I had not prepared myself -- the capacity of the desirable unwittingly to torture is enormous! "But your father -- " "Hell, this is Friday, Duke -- payday. The old man's got the refrigerator and himself stuffed with beer and he's probably passed out Definition 17 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.18 ------------------------------------ by now and won't wake up till noon tomorrow. Anyway, he don't give a damn if I'm there or not." Events were fast getting beyond my control. I steeled myself to refuse him, then the boy bent his head and my eyes were drawn to his hair -- dark blond, thick, lustrous -- and to the curve of his cheek beneath. "All right," I said carefully. "I'll make up a bed for you on the living-room couch." "You better put a pad under the bottom sheet, Duke," Joey laughed, "cause I've been getting some awful messy dreams lately!" I winced -- why does he tell this to me? "I'll lend you a pair of my pajamas; that should take care of any . . . accident." "I sleep raw in the summer, Duke . . . didn't you know?" I didn't know and the knowledge overwhelmed me. "I'll double the bottom sheet, then," I mumbled through a mist in which the boy's eyes burned into mine. He took a shower and returned, still drying himself, careless with the towel, revealing . . . "If you're all set, Joey, I'll say good-night." I fled and filled the tub with cold water, noting that the boy has left the bathroom cleaner than he found it. Feverishly I immerse myself in the icy liquid, stay there until my body ceases its shameless clamor. My bedroom is in darkness. I walk to the window and stare out at the hushed night: The moon is hidden behind a bank of clouds but the stars are still there. In the next house I see old Mrs. Knowlton, victim of a tyrannous insomnia, pacing back and forth. The aged at least should be granted the boon of sleep . . . but I know I will lie awake until dawn. I pull down the shade, turn blindly. Suddenly the bedlamp clicks into brightness and my dazzled eyes take in the golden glow of Joey's body sprawled full length in my bed. His eyes challenge me, his smile dares me as deliberately he displays his young passion and I know I will at long last surrender to its wonderous demand. Ah, Cherubino, perhaps after all I can help you! What is Love! you asked. Know then that Love is Eros, Love is Cupid, Love is a boy with his rigid arrow poised blissfully to wound! 18 KALOS 1/1 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.19 ------------------------------------ Sufi Poetry -- Boy-Love and the Divine Ustad Selim, Tehran, Iran Sufi poetry has been notorious for centuries because of its outspoken love of boys, the poet addressing his Saki or cupbearer or his Beloved Friend as troubadors addressed their Ladies or their God. To some outsiders this has been scandalous, to others erotic exotica, to still others an occasion for unconvincing excuse -- making on the order of those Christian commentators who make the biblical wedding idyl "The Song of Songs" into an allegory of Christ's love for His Church; but to almost none has the true significance been even suspected, as it would be almost unintelligible to the unenlightened. I In Sufi poetry the love of boys IS the love of God. Not at all can one say that the one is a mere symbol of the other, or conversely, a mere excuse for the other. To the uninitiate, the one is profane, the other sacred; but to the Sufi, even as to the initiate of the Gnosis of the Hermetics, "As above, so below." This is simply one of many instances of a universal truth in Sufi culture: Every fact has at least one meaning other than its literal one. In everything you hear of Sufis or their practice or literature, look for the additional symbolism which is behind its being at all retold. Why, for example, is it recorded as important that the Qoranic scholar al-Iraqi, bewitched by the beauty of a young boy travelling with a band of dervishes, gave up his books and took to the road with them, being led to the intoxications of the dance, of hashish, and of love? Even if the boy were real, he was also for al-Iraqi an emblem of God, and the scholar's abandonment of his former worldly life was much the same kind of retreat into the wilderness as represented the turning point in the lives of the Prophet Muhammad, of Jesus, of Prince Gautama the Buddha, and of many saints in every world religion. Dervishes are a cult of devotees of God in a form or aspect akin to the Dionysos of the ancient Greeks, and their dancing leads to ecstatic 19 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.20 ------------------------------------ union; hence the scholar's adoption of the dance is a conversion experience. Hashish is for many Muslims a key to unlocking the doors of the worlds lying beyond the physical universe, hence also its use by the dervishes and al-Iraqi. And love is, in Sufiism as in most mystical beliefs the world over, the force leading humans back to God. In silence, in speech, in every graceful eye, In every half-closed lid He speaks to me . . . Every Sufi poem peels away like the petals of a rose: outside, a beautiful and sensuous love poem; next, an immediate religious meaning (most easily grasped by substituting "God" for "Him", "the Beloved", "Friend", etc.); then an esoteric religious meaning, the famous Sufi "code". Typical examples of this code<note 1> include: The Cheek -- revelation of Divine Beauty in the Attributes of Grace, Beauty Mark -- point of Real Unity, Eyebrow -- attributes of God, veiling His Essence, Wine -- the ecstasy of knowing the Beloved. All the petals, fallen or stripped away, leave nothing. "My poems are trash," said Rumi, master of the Whirling Dervishes. This may be taken in the same light as Thomas Aquinas' dismissal of his own towering philosophical structure as being mere straw. In the face of the Beloved -- whatever the symbolic Boy or the reality past all symbols -- mere words are only an interference, something casting a shadow, something making ripples on the clear stream, something to be brushed aside, left behind. Hence the final symbol: Nothing -- Silence in the Creative Void, the Ecstasy of the Enlightenment. When you are making love, or when the heavens open up to you in the mystical experience, you do not speak. And when you speak later on, recalling the experience in tranquility, if you are to communicate even a small fragment of the original flash of grandeur, you must needs speak in poetry. II There is no mistaking the sensuality of the poems below, a sensuality accepted by Sufis as the height of Piety. (Even now the tomb of Hafiz of Shiraz is a place of pilgrimage for lovers of boys -- as for Sufi initiates.) Orthodox Islam does not always look kindly on boy-love, wherefore the greatest minds of Sufiism, from al-Ghazzali to Ibn Arabi, have written in its defense, as a poetic device, as an acceptable symbolic manifestation of the Love of God -- akin in its highest form to Bhakti-Yoga. From then till now, personal histories aside, the Sufis have always been able to 20 KALOS 1/1 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.21 ------------------------------------ see the symbolic element in boy-love and in such poems as these, while outsiders have been blinded to all else by the sensuality. I have adopted a free-verse technique in attempting the following translations.<note 2> Rhyme and metre are more important in literary Arabic than in English, and offer a different set of possibilities to the poet; therefore attempts to imitate the original structures would unduly confine the thought while forbidding the paraphrases necessary to convey some of the connotations. Literary Arabic, even in prose, is notoriously difficult to translate, each Arabic word having what may be called a wider "color-band" of additional connotations, secondary meanings, literary associations, etc., than its literal English counterpart. Those writing in English who, like Edward Fitzgerald, have made good poetry, have often sacrificed too much meaning; and those who, like Nicolson, are more literally correct, have missed much of the poetry. For which reason the recent version of the Rubaiyat or Quatrains of Omar Khayyam, despite the enormous reputation of Robert Graves, is less good as a poetic evocation of what Omar was trying to communicate than was Fitzgerald's fantasy on the same themes. Even the recent translator of the Gulistan of Sa'di finds himself forced to hang too many explanations and footnotes round Sa'di's neck, wherefore the poet now no longer dances, but limps. If mine do no better, at least may I hope some of the feeling of the original is communicated. Oh joy! that I have found the fair to be kind as well. Sa'ki, pass round the cup! Musician, play of happiness. Among this gathering of wise men your face shines out. Gently, my love, lest we waken these drunkards to our chaste delights. Last evening, sweet boy, you it was who drank. (I see the wine-sleep in your eyes.) But I shall not tell . . . and may I therefore not be your companion? Those Turkish eyes, that white brow -- an arrow to my heart -- oh, Who gave this boy such deadly playthings? Sufi Poetry 21 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.22 ------------------------------------ A bird in a cage am I, waiting for you to shatter the cage, to soar. --SA'DI Turkish eyes -- dark, framed by long, dark lashes, brilliant white. The Western Wind seeks through every garden hoping to find one rose so sweet, so soft as your cheek . . . in vain. Show us your face, bewilder the world with beauty! Listen to Man and Woman cry, speak to and comfort them. Each lock of your hair is a barbed hook to catch my heart which is now bleeding from a thousand wounds -- And yet pale companies of hopeless lovers may, meeting years from now, perhaps speak Hafiz' name with a tear, a word of praise. All idols fall before my Love, standing, cup in hand; and he who notices those bright eyes must censor his thoughts. Like a fish to the sea I swam hoping to fall into his net. I lie prostrate at his feet hoping to feel his hand lift me up. He who has drunk of the Cup-Without-Death shall laugh as I do. --HAFIZ 22 KALOS 1/1 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.23 ------------------------------------ The rosebuds bow to your smile, and you can charm the trees or the three thousand High and Proud Ones. Dreaming of your half-opened eyes, so soft with sleep, the Rose of Spring is already half-faded. The Sun has given you His crown, and I have died in my heart. You have killed me, but I still must pray to you. The bird of heaven, wounded by your smile, dripped blood upon the dawn. Shadows may fly up to kiss the sun, and, inasmuch as I have wings, my flight is for you. --ATTAR The crown refers more likely to facial radiance than to blond hair, but either would be symbolically appropriate. The meadow wears a satin blue-green mask, The mountains veils of seven colors, earth like a muskpod smells of many things and the green willow, like some green bird, moves or does not move in Spring's newest breeze just born last night, a breeze which hides up inside its trailing sleeve different crushed perfumes. The garden fills its lap with dolls. On one tree necklaces of pearls, on another ruby earrings. Ruby earrings on the judas-tree, and human hands hang from the sycamore. Gardens like chameleons, branches with chameleon whorls, pools broken by a million tiny pearls of rain. Now the plain itself covered with hundreds of green tents and in each tent two lovers lie, on each small meadow-grass hill some pair of friends embraces; the Prince's Camp of Branding. Sufi Poetry 23 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.24 ------------------------------------ There is music all around, singing and playing, and from every tent the sound of glass on glass as each graceful Saki fills a bowl; and, lower, the sound of kisses, of soft kisses, of soft reproaches and rustling clothes; drinkers nod over their wine, the minstrels wake them And a fire is lit before the gate, before the Prince's Tent and all is etched in gold brocade hotter than anger itself, in which the branding tools are placed, and glow until the fire is like a pomegranate split. All around stand ranks of boys tending ranks of horses, endless rows and rows waiting for the Prince's brand, and up and down the Prince rides with his lasso, which bends and twists like the curls of a pretty child, but holds stronger than friends' love, coiled like a snake, , ever changing, taking new forms like the rod of Moses. And whoever falls to That Noose has burned on his face and side the Royal Sign. The Prince, though he does this branding, can give rewards as well, and leads His poets as with a bridle, binds His guests as though with rope. --FARRUKHI This is surely the most extraordinary verse account of a mystical experience known to me in literature since the Prophet Muhammad, with the possible exception of Thompson's Hound of Heaven, and some of the later efforts of Blake. The Prince is obviously a symbol of God, the branding a baptism or initiatory experience into divine service. Sycamore is traditionally the tree on which Judas Iscariot hanged himself; a muskpod is something like a sachet; and for those who have never seen a pomegranate and thus cannot imagine the sense of the comparison, the most fiery vermilion in vegetable life is intended.<note 3> Note that the mere proximity of the Prince is taken as a stimulus to human beings to pair off in love, and that the Prince himself, so far from being sought by admirers, chooses the fairest boys much as would a Turkish Sultan for his harem: the implications being, among other things, that a man falling in love with a boy is, however imperfectly, symbolizing or recapitulating God seizing someone he finds worthy of His attentions. 24 KALOS 1/1 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.25 ------------------------------------ Is there no breeze to take my message to him or his reply to me? How can I let him see his very name spoken is more than I can bear? What joy to be his prisoner, how glad the bird he snares must be! When the moon is bright above his roof, Heaven looks down in envy on such a place, and as the breeze caresses the cedar in that night so I desire to be beside his body, touching it. And if I win the race to the tavern, will the Elder not give me wine as my reward? --DJAMI NOTES 1. Muhsin Faid Kashani, Risala-yi Mishwaq (An Explanation of the Symbols Commonly Used in Sufi Poetry). But most modern versions of Sufi poetry give some half-apologetic samples from this quasi-dictionary, generally without understanding why the symbols were chosen. A possible explanation may be found in the concept of the androgynous (hence adolescently beautiful) Adam Qadmon or primordial archetype of the human, found in the Platonic world of Ideas and most often discussed in the Qabalistic writings of Jewish mystics. This symbol is taken as representing, among other things, the "His Own Image" in which God supposedly made man, in male and female. It would follow, then, that each physical feature attributed to the archetype must represent some aspect of the Divine. Therefore, why not take the physical embodiment in a beloved youth as a visible correspondence to these supraphysical realities? 2. Some of these translations are the result of collaborations with the Sufi scholar Dr. Sahab al-Zalila, M.O.C. Others are reworkings of older literal translations, supervised by him. 3. Editor's Note: The color vermilion also derives from the ancient cinnabar or red crystalline mercuric sulphide, prized for its brilliant scarlet, used as a pigment, and for ink or sealing-wax. Further, its use was for centuries the sole right of the emperors of China, so singular and prized was it. Sufi Poetry 25 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.26 ------------------------------------ Hypocrisy at any Price In the fall of 1975, a major North American metropolitan newspaper ran two articles on boy prostitution in a residential neighborhood of that city. Shortly thereafter, the official news-sheet of the city's gay activist organization ran an article attacking the newspaper's approach and the attitude of the parents and police. The three articles are quoted as completely and directly as prudence allows: Contrary to our normal policy of giving source reference, that city's boy hustlers have already received enough undue attention; no good is served in further advertising their situation. What is here of greater interest is the fact that a gay-non-pedophile-group has spoken out as it has. All names and places have been changed or deleted. I Children of the Night Seek $5 High In Exchange for Homosexual Favors These are children of the night: two or three boys huddled together on a street corner, a lone teen-ager sitting on the steps of a row-house or standing in a doorway, waiting for a beckoning glance from a passing motorist that may mean $5 or $10 in his pocket to buy a night's supply of beer or marijuana. The youngsters, boys ranging in age from 10 to 17, call it "hustling": They are involved in the practice of selling sexual favors to adult male homosexuals. Many of their customers come from various areas, from the city and from out of state. And they have a wide variety of jobs and social positions. Stan (not his real name), a tough-talking 15-year-old, described some of his customers: "There was one steelworker. One was a chef, another was an ice cream truck driver." A social worker in the area said many come from troubled homes, though they do not represent the dangerous, violence-prone delinquents associated with the city's poverty areas. While the hustling does not seem to be widespread among the area's youngsters, a dozen to 30 of the 26 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.27 ------------------------------------ boys might be on the street plying their "business" on any night. They stand on favorite corners, flashing signals to passing motorists. Five fingers waved at a potential customer means the price is $5. The hustling spots range along several streets in the boys' home neighborhood. Spots change, depending on police activity. Neighborhood sources say that a rougher and older group usually congregates closer to one end of this hustling area. The few social workers, policemen and others who have tried to do something about the problem all agree that the boys are motivated by the easiness of making $5 or $10 for a few minutes of sexual activity. "There ain't really nothing wrong with it, if you need the money," said 13-year-old Rick, who said he quit hustling a few months ago when two social workers and the Police Department joined to try to end the practice in the area. The practice is not a new one. One source familiar with the homosexual community said the city is famous for its "cruising scene." Practices involving younger teen-agers and pre-teen boys in the area have been going on for at least a decade and probably longer, with little or no publicity and, until last fall, little apparent effort to do anything about it. "I know a lot of people who hustled who today claim they didn't," said a young social worker who grew up in this area. While city policemen were ready to talk about the hustling scene in hopes that publicity would encourage neighborhood leaders and parents to take an interest in stopping the practice, professional community workers were somewhat reluctant to get involved. A social worker who helped a reporter meet youngsters involved in hustling asked that his name not be used in any articles on the subject, saying he was so instructed by his supervisor. Recently, after receiving some complaints, city plainclothes officers and a committee of social workers and community people began a campaign against hustling. "Up until this time, when we cracked into this, we didn't see it as a problem," one police officer said. With the help of a city Vice Squad officer, four or five arrests were made, four of them ending with the defendants being given probation without a verdict. All the plainclothes officers agreed that the problem cannot be dealt with only by the Police Department. "We can't do it without the parents' help," said an officer with the city's plainclothes squad. He described -- and other officers demonstrated on the street -- the difficulties in dealing with homosexual prostitution by the youngsters. Police have tried making arrests, with limited success. For example, a youthful-looking officer may pose as a teen-age hustler, but "can stand out there and never get solicited," said the plainclothes officer. Another method of dealing Hypocrisy at any Price 27 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.28 ------------------------------------ with the problem is telling groups of boys on street corners to "move along," a practice that merely moves the "business" a few blocks away, according to the officers. The police have watched pickups, then followed the cars, trying to sneak up on the occupants during the sexual activity, but the customers appear to be a very careful group. Officers demonstrated this method of enforcement one night after spotting a large, expensive car that had stopped and picked up two boys. Police pursued the car back and forth through the streets, then out of the area and back into the city. No arrest was made. The driver had apparently noticed the policemen's nondescript, unmarked car very early in the pursuit, according to the officers. Another method recently tried was working with a 17-year-old informant, according to the vice squad. That procedure led to one arrest, they said. Now, the policemen have decided to pick youngsters up periodically at some late hour and take them home. "We can't tell the parents their kids are out there hustling," an officer explained, "but they can be told of the dangers which their children face." II The following day, another article on this situation appeared in the same newspaper: Parent of Teen-Age "Hustlers" Blames Courts A 34-year-old-woman said yesterday that she spent six unsuccessful months trying to get official action against homosexual prostitution among boys in her neighborhood after she caught her 11-and 13-year-old sons hustling. "I tried to do something. I tried, but it's still going on. It's the fault of the courts," the woman said. The widowed mother of three teen-agers asked that her identity not be disclosed, saying she feared reprisals against herself and her children. The woman talked to a reporter in the living room of her house in the hustling area. She said she discovered her sons were hustling -- the term youngsters use to describe the practice -- when they brought home a set of bar-bells. "They told me a neighborhood kid gave them the weights. I checked it out with the neighbors and they told me it wasn't true." She said her younger son finally admitted what was going on. She said the boys had been driven to a house in their area where they engaged in homosexual practices with a group of men. The woman said she was "shamed" by the discovery, and really angry that "adults were messing with my kids." 28 KALOS 1/1 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.29 ------------------------------------ She said she went to the police for help and "after a hell of a time," managed to get warrants for three men who had been involved with her sons. To get information for the warrants, she said she spent six months in 1973 after the incident "standing on streets" taking license numbers and gathering names for police investigators. "The policemen on the beat would check the tags against the Motor Vehicle Administration ownership list," she said. Her efforts, and later efforts on the part of several area families and community organizers, resulted in arrests of some of the adults involved. The men were fined and placed on probation before verdict, something the woman said she is still angry about. "We had four sex offenses on one man and he got probation. Can you imagine?" she asked. Another area resident expressed interest yesterday in getting something done about the problem. "I think the police should go to work and arrest somebody," said the city councilman for that area. "I'm not going to investigate it," he said, adding that he has known about the problem and has requested police action in the past. III The next article comes from the gay activist publication in the city where this unfortunate situation exists. It is in response to the two articles above. It is entitled: A Different Point of View Last month, the main daily newspaper of our city ran two rather sensational articles about teenage hustling here. Of course, that neighborhood's greatest political opportunist jumped on the issue as one of her reasons for supporting the teenage curfew bill. She was not alone however. Other area politicos who have long been known to be short on intellect were also outraged by the disclosure. In fact, the article was indeed shocking for three reasons: 1) It made a big deal out of nothing new; 2) it had the wrong persons as victims; and 3) it lacked genuine insight into what this city's "hustling" scene is all about. First of all, hustling of the type portrayed in the article has been going on for several generations. It is an institution in that area. Many of the kids who are on the streets now have fathers who were probably doing the same thing 15 or 20 years ago. Hypocrisy at any Price 29 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.30 ------------------------------------ Secondly, usually no one gets hurt and if anyone is, it is frequently the gay men, not the boys. Because of society's attitude in general and the cops' attitude in particular, these men are not too infrequently "rolled" by young hoods who have gotten the message loud and clear that gays are fair game. As one boy who, after climaxing and beating a man unmercifully told his victim: "Go ahead, fag, and call the cops; you know what I'll tell them. I had to defend myself." The cops' attitude in such a case (and the boys know it) is that the man got what he deserved. While it is truly touching to see such genuine concern for helpless victims, the articles had the wrong parties as victims. Finally, the articles' concern that the young boys are being exploited somehow misses the point. The premise seems to be that the boys are enticed by money to have sex with men with whom they otherwise would not be involved. (Where this is so, it is unfortunate, but perhaps no more exploiting than selling one's labor for a salary.) However, this is just simply not the way the game is played. While many kids are paid for sexual favors, they are not out primarily for money. Money is simply the justification to satisfy the guilt factor. What most, boys really want are good times, attention and love. They want to be noticed, and the men give them attention when their parents don't. They want sex and they get it. They want to have a good time and the men give them that too. And more often than not, money is never mentioned. Of course, when they are back with their friends or talking to a reporter they can't admit that they go with a faggot just because they have a good time with him. Hell, someone might think they are queer, too! So they brag about the money they get. They say that if it weren't for the money, they wouldn't waste their time. What people fail to realize is that many boys enjoy tricking with men. They don't say it with words, but they say it over and over again, night after night. And the sex isn't all one way either. They are on the streets because they want to be and newspaper articles like the two last month really do the boys a disservice because this reinforces in their minds that they are doing something wrong, something to be ashamed of. However, because it is a natural drive that they can't control, they do it anyway and then feel guilty about it. Laying this guilt trip on them is the real crime, and it may have serious consequences. For while it may manifest itself in a simple request for money, or a claim that money was given when in fact it was not, it might also result in an assault, robbery and even murder. Articles like these perpetuate the myths that gay sex is bad, that relationships between men and boys are inherently exploitative and that "normal" boys have no desire for homosexual relationships. Because those responsible for these 30 KALOS 1/1 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.31 ------------------------------------ articles believed the myths, they naturally swallowed the boy's claims that they hustle only for the money without giving it much thought. Of course, you can't expect much from the straight media; they simply don't understand. One final point, the outraged parents of this city should stop and think for a moment about why their boys are in the streets in the first place. Is it not much easier for a mother to spend six months tracking down some gay men who might have given her boys a good time than it is to try to develop a meaningful and constructive relationship with her sons? Some people only know how to respond in negative terms. Since they don't know how to relate to their children positively, they prove to themselves that they really do care about their children by making a big external display of their love and concern. The plain fact is that many of the men do more for the boys on the streets than their parents ever do. IV It is reported to Kalos that the mother who was writing down the car tag numbers of men stopping for boys was well known to the boys and that some boys were warning their customers of her activities and also of which places the police were watching. Further, sources claim that several members of that city's police forces are frequent customers of the boys. As one boy, age 13, is reported to have said, when a customer was assuring him that he was not a plainclothes policeman: "Ha! Some of my regulars are cops!" Hypocrisy at any Price 31 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.32 ------------------------------------ Were the Bulgars 'Buggers'? Dr. Warren Johansson, Scientific and Technical Editor A Note to the Editor: Noel Garde has told me that a small publishing house near Frankfurt am Main has reprinted Hirschfeld's Die Homosexualitat des Mannes und des Weibes but his own letter to the firm brought no reply. I have not yet verified the information; have you heard anything? While I am working with Professor L., I should have the opportunity of investigating the question "Were the Bulgars really buggers?" Not one of the previous writers on this subject, so far as I know, has had access to the Old Bulgarian texts that are the most reliable sources. I was amused to learn that a doctoral dissertation on the Bogomils, written at Columbia University in the 1920's, passes over this problem in complete silence. It may well be that the later semantic development of Bulgarus/bougre/bugger is the result of Catholic defamation of their Catharist opponents. The fact is attested that all prosecutions for witchcraft in the 14th and 15th centuries include charges of sodomy in the indictments, which explains the proximity of the two offenses in the Parliamentary enactment under Elizabeth I as mentioned in Greek Love; we have to do here not with an accident of English legal history but with an established pattern in Western European thinking on sorcery. Have you investigated the origin of the expression "Greek Love"? There may be a hidden semantic problem that the English speaker would not readily recognize. I mention this because in a Church Slavonic adaption of a sermon by St. Gregory Nazianzen I encountered the term "Hellenic love" with this meaning. To Byzantine writers "Hellenic" often means "pagan." (Curiously enough, the expression is, absent from St. Gregory's Greek original.) Also, Otto de Joux, writing in 1897, entitled his book Die hellenische Liebe in der Gegenwart and not Die griechische Liebe . . . J.Z. Eglinton responds: No other report has reached me about any reprint of any of Magnus Hirschfeld's books, but then we are not as yet on the mailing-lists of most German publishers. This situation may change shortly. Whatever, 32 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.33 ------------------------------------ English-language translations of Hirschfeld may be out of the question because of his essentially pre-Freudian approach. All I have heard of the Cathars indicate that they were accused of homosexual practices owing to their religious aversion to marriage, and these accusations seem to have had no more foundation than similar accusations hurled randomly at monks and actors. Another person has alluded to an exchange of pornographic verse lampoons among members of a circle of Provencal poets, each accusing the other(s) of having played the catamite; and in the Middle Ages to be of Provencal origin was to lay oneself open to suspicion of Albigensian heresy. The close association of witchcraft and homosexual practice in popular and legal thought points to something closely analogous to Asiatic shamanism, a point made by Edward Carpenter in Intermediate Types and elsewhere. When I began the original research which resulted in Greek Love, I believed I had invented the designation as a technical term, though I know "Greek" had been a catchword meaning homosexual a century before. Of course, Byzantines would have used "Hellenic" to refer to their pagan ancestors of the same language, and by logical extension also to denote pagan practices of almost any kind. It does not follow that the Byzantines, aside from the horrified prude who edited Book XII of the Anthology, knew the precise meaning of Greek love. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Coming in Kalos Charles -- A Boy's View. Translated with introduction by Dr. Edward Brongersma, Netherlands: The written recollections of Charles, a boy who at age 14 began to develop a full Greek Love relationship with a teacher at boarding school. Pedophilia in Denmark. Jens Jersild, now in retirement, is former Chief of the Vice Squad in Copenhagen. During his long career, he authored four epoch-making reports on homosexuality, boy-prostitution and pedophilia in Denmark. His most recent work, Pedophilia, is a penetrating inquiry into the backround of Danish legal and social viewpoints. Written with suggestions for liberalizing the laws. Discussed, with commentary, by J.Z.E. Greek Love in Juvenile Institutions. Much has been written about sex in prisons and reformatories. This essay discusses, from the literature, evidence of Greek Love involving older and younger boys in training schools and reformatories. Comparable material on orphanages and other institutions will be reserved for a separate study. Other articles will treat Guilt-Free Pedophilia, On Dealing with Inhibitions, Greek Love in Marocco, The Arts of Courtship, An Enquiry Among Pedophiles, and much more. Were Bulgars 'Buggers"! 33 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.34 ------------------------------------ Varia Floreat Etona A recent news-item may show just how far Eton College is prepared to go to "let a thousand flowers bloom," to show off its lovely, young blossoms. In "Parade" for February 6, 1976 (a national Sunday newspaper color supplement in the U.S.), we read: Tourist Attraction -- Students at Eton College, where Britain's rich and royal families traditionally send their sons, want their school turned into a tourist attraction. Like most preparatory schools, Eton badly needs money. To get some, the 'Eton Chronicle,' the school newspaper, suggests that the school try to attract some of the 3.5 million tourists who annually visit nearby Windsor Castle. It suggests the construction on campus of a tourist shop to sell souvenirs, guidebooks, and to rent out student guides. --Eton has, in fact, long been something of a specialized tourist attraction, but perhaps not of the paying sort. We understand -- although cannot verify -- that not so many years ago there was a popular saying round at the College that: "Little boys are half-a-crown, standing up or bending down." A Modest Proposal "Shouldn't you think that men's clubs might like to adopt boys, as a sort of mascot? The boy could be boarded in a nice respectable family, and drawn out by the different members on Saturday afternoons. They could take him to ball-games and the circus, and then return him when they had had enough, just as you do with a library book. It would be very valuable training for the bachelors. People are forever talking about the desirability of training girls for motherhood. Why not institute a course of training in fatherhood, and get the best men's clubs to take it up? Will you please have Jervis agitate the matter at his various clubs, and I'll have Gordon start the like in Washington. They both belong to such a lot of clubs that we ought to dispose of at least a dozen boys. I remain The ever-distracted mother of 113, S(allie) McB(ride)." --Jean Webster, Dear Enemy, p.57. New York: Century Co., 1916. The mise-en-scene is the John Grier Home for Orphans. --As a note to this, may we refer to a story, long abroad in the land, that certain private and church-affiliated orphanages have, in fact, been performing such a "community service." Apparently, a few wealthy -- and very generous -- "patrons" have been allowed to take a child home with them for the day or the weekend. Any complaints from the orphans about their patrons' "ministrations" have been effectively hushed up or denied, to the child's face -- by the homes' directors -- as being on the order of "ungrateful fantasies." 34 KALOS 1/1 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.35 ------------------------------------ Advertisements These advertisements are listed in alphabetical order. Mention in Kalos is not to be construed as automatic endorsement of the publications or groups listed below. They have agreed to mention Kalos and we reciprocate. BETTER LIFE MONTHLY (U.S.A.) Male homosexual pedophilia, information, articles, photos, also efforts on legal and social reform. Monthly. Subscription: U.S.A. and Canada, $14 per year; elsewhere, $20. Mailed third class. Write: Better Life Monthly, 256 South Robertson, Beverly Hills, California, 90211, U.S.A. GAY NEWS (United Kingdom) Europe's largest circulation Gay newspaper. Subscription to U.S.A. (in unsealed envelope only): Surface mail -- 13 issues $14; 26 issues $23. Air mail -- 13 issues $20; 26 issues $38. Copies $ I surface mail; $1.50 air mail. Write: Gay News, 1A Normand Gardens, Greyhound Road, London W14 9SB, United Kingdom. GAY NEWS (West Germany) News items, articles, special current-events topics on international gay and pedophile news. World's most complete coverage on all international and regional news events relating to the gay and pedophile life-styles. Monthly, in German only, but there are plans to publish also in English. Also, special Boy-Love section with each issue. Write: Gay News Germany, Mainblick 15, Kronberg/Taunus, Federal Republic of Germany, D-6242. GLAD DAY BOOKS (Canada) Gay liberation books and periodicals. Write: Glad Day, 139 Seaton Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5A 2T2. HERMES (U.S.A.) Male homosexual pedophilia, mild erotica, some articles and photos. Six times per year. Subscription: U.S.A., $6 per year; overseas, $9. Mailed by first class in brown envelope. New address: Hermes, P.O. Box 802, North Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A., 60064 Advertisements 35 ==================================== KALOS v.1 n.1, p.36 ------------------------------------ LAMBDA RISING (U.S.A.) Gay liberation periodicals and books. U.S.A. and overseas publications. Write: Lambda Rising, 1724 - 20th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009, U.S.A. PAIS (Switzerland) Male homosexual pedophilia. Articles in German on various topics relating to boy-love: Photos, stories, news items; active interest in law reform. Four-color cover photo, several black-white photos inside. Mailed in plain, brown, sealed envelope, first class. Prices in Europe: Single copy -- 10 DM; six issue annual subscription -- 50 DM. Overseas prices: Single copy -- $8 (US); six issue annual subscription -- $45 (US). Write: S.A.P., Postfach 138, Bern 9, Switzerland, CH-3000. To Order Kalos Kalos appears each four months. 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