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. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.1 ------------------------------------ INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE Published quarterly by the Oliver Layton Press, Box 150, Cooper Station, New York, N.Y. 10003, to which all correspondence should be addressed. Copyright © 1966 by Oliver Layton Press. Vol.I: No.2; NOVEMBER, 1966. Subscription rate is $6.00 for four issues. CONTENTS 3 Howard STONEFIELD New York BURTON'S TERMINAL ESSAY The famous appendix to The Arabian Nights, dealing in detail with boy-love especially in the Moslem world, is given a resume and critical evaluation. 13 Jonathan DRAKE Beirut "LE VICE" IN TURKEY A historical sketch of the slave traffic in boys in Turkey from about the 14th century until recent decades. 28 Toby HAMMOND London PAIDIKION: A PAIDERASTIC MANUSCRIPT Describes and deduces the authorship of a remarkable piece of erotica, comparable to the Black Diaries of Sir Roger Casement. 38 ANONYMOUS New England ADMISSIONS OF A DIRECTOR OF ADMISSIONS Personal reminiscences and comments on the "sublimation" demanded of personnel in a private school for boys. 40 J.Z. EGLINTON New York THE LATER CAREER OF JOHN FRANCIS BLOXAM Hitherto little-known biographical information about the author of The Priest and the Acolyte. 43 VARIA 47 LETTERS 57 RECENT BOOKS ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.2 ------------------------------------ <NOTE: page 2 was left blank intentionally in the original journal> ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.3 ------------------------------------ Burton's "Terminal Essay" HOWARD STONEFIELD, New York City ABSTRACT: The famous appendix to the Arabian Nights, dealing in detail with boy-love especially in the Moslem world, is given a resume and critical evaluation. Sooner or later, the average student of sexology, especially of homosexuality, comes across mention of the so-called Terminal Essay by Sir Richard F. Burton, appended to his famous but more read-about than read translation of the Arabian Nights. With this mention is usually the suggestion, stated or implied, that the Terminal Essay is a compilation of high-speed erotica dealing mainly with boy-love, or even downright buggery, depending on the prejudices of the author who cites it. However, the facts are quite otherwise. The Terminal Essay is merely one section of a much larger appendix to the entire Kitab Alf Laylah wa-Laylah or the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, translated by Sir Richard Francis Burton,<note 1> and privately printed by the Burton Club.<note 2> The appendix fills nearly the whole of Volume X, which was published in 1886. Chapter IV, entitled "Social Condition," is but one subdivision of the Terminal Essay; and Section D, "Pederasty," represents a fraction of this Chapter. In the appendix Burton seeks to familiarize the reader with such exotic subjects as the origin, poetry and prosody of the Nights, anthropological materials, historical matters, etc. The section on boy-love is definitely written not to shock or titillate, but merely to present anthropological facts about this area of erotica and their relationship to the Nights. Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) spent his childhood in France and Italy, acquiring enormous fluency in continental vernaculars. At Trinity College, Oxford, his behavior was so eccentric as to lead to rustication (expulsion) after less than two years; but in the meantime he had there begun independent study of literary Arabic, no tutor then being available. He joined the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry at ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.4 ------------------------------------ 4 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE Baroda in October 1842, two years almost to the day after he had entered Oxford. Here too he was an eccentric and a rebel, and his attachment to the East India Company was solely in order to take advantage of opportunities for studying oriental folkways and languages. He had in the meantime learned Urdu and probably begun learning some other tongues and dialects. In Indian service he became fluent in -- among others -- Gujarati, Marathi, Sindi, Persian and vernacular Arabic. In 1845, Burton was detailed by Sir Charles James Napier (1782- 1853), conqueror of Muslim Sind (now Pakistan), to investigate three brothels in Karachi where "Boys and Eunuchs, the former demanding nearly a double price," were to be had.<note 3> Inasmuch as Burton was the only Sindi-speaking officer available, he was given this duty. He accepted it on the express condition that his report not be transmitted to British authorities in Bombay. He went, he saw, he reported. He passed as a native, "Mirza Abdullah al-Bushiri," in bazaars and native quarters, visiting the male-staffed brothels, passing unrecognized even by his fellow-officers, and learning much that no British officer in uniform could have found out. Two reports followed: "Notes on the Population of Sind, &c.," Dec. 31, 1847, and "Brief Notes on the Modes of Intoxication, &c.," March 2, 1848, in collaboration with his botanist friend John E. Stocks, Assistant Surgeon, who died shortly afterwards. The reports, outspokenly frank, were forwarded to the Governor and eventually reached Bombay; as a result, Burton fell into official disfavor and narrowly escaped dismissal from the service. The reports were printed in Selections from the Records of the Government of India, Bombay: New Series, XVII, part 2, 1855. Official biographies generally pass over this and related episodes in his career. Nevertheless, it is on record that his wanderings in Sindi native quarters prepared him for his eventual (1853) pilgrimage to Mecca, and the story goes that in order to pass inspection as a devout Muslim, he had himself circumcised at a friend's house, while calmly sipping brandy. He did reach Mecca and the Ka'ba, the black stone "fallen from heaven" (a meteorite) which had been for thousands of years an object of veneration by Arabs. He returned alive, never identified by Muslims as an unbeliever; and he wrote up the experience in a book, Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah (1855), which became world-famous. This journey was only the first of dozens he undertook into hitherto unexplored Muslim and native African territories. It was these explorations, affording him opportunity for first-hand ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.5 ------------------------------------ Burton's Terminal Essay 5 observations of native folkways in many areas, which led to his continuing interest in erotica and homosexuality and ultimately to his formulation of the controversial theory of the "Sotadic Zone," first spelled out in the Terminal Essay. It doubtless enriched his translation of the Nights and aroused his interest in issuing a revised translation into English of the Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh al-Nafzawi -- burned in ms. immediately after Burton's death by his Catholic widow.<note 4> Burton's conclusions about the Sotadic Zone are worth quoting<note 5> in full: "1. There exists what I shall call a 'Sotadic Zone,' bounded westwards by the northern shores of the Mediterranean (N.Lat. 43<degrees>) and by the southern (N.Lat. 30<degrees>). Thus the depth would be 780 to 800 miles including meridional France, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Greece, with the coast-regions of Africa from Marocco to Egypt. "2. Running eastwards the Sotadic Zone narrows, embracing Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Chaldaea, Afghanistan, Sind, the Punjab and Kashmir. "3. In Indo-China the belt begins to broaden, enfolding China, Japan and Turkestan. "4. It then embraces the South Sea Islands and the New World where, at the time of its discovery, Sotadic love was, with some exceptions, an established racial institution. "5. Within the Sotadic Zone the Vice [sc. of boy-love] is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the limits here defined practise it only sporadically amid the opprobrium of their fellows who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation and look upon it with the liveliest disgust." Burton holds that this heightened frequency of "the Vice" is merely climatic and geographical, but not specifically racial in origin. He nowhere defines what he means by the terms "climatic," "geographical," or "racial," but his usage of them allows us to determine from context that he was groping toward the notion that boy-love was a more or less recognized social institution in certain cultures. Sociology did not exist in his day, and cultural anthropology was still in an embryonic state, principally concerned with assimilating Darwin's theories to the spread between primitive and highly civilized groups. Burton then goes into a long discussion of boy-love in its educational, companionistic and aesthetic aspects. This derives largely from classical literature and from the summaries in M.H.E. Meier.<note 6> It can be omitted here, having been superseded by the superb study of the subject by Eglinton.<note 7> ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.6 ------------------------------------ 6 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE Burton was concerned with why boy-love was so frequent in these particular geographical areas and so infrequent elsewhere -- a question seldom asked, but far easier to ask than to answer, especially in that pre scientific epoch.<note 8> His answers involved physical and psychological conjectures. So far as physical causes are concerned, Burton advances the theory that "within the Sotadic Zone there is a blending of the masculine and feminine temperaments, a crasis which elsewhere occurs only sporadically." Again, this may be criticized on the ground of inadequate definition of terms: he nowhere explains what he means by "masculine and feminine temperaments." However, he evidently saw something, and Eglinton has tentatively identified it with the somewhat androgynous beauty of adolescent boys,<note 9> who reach puberty early in intermingled cultures more sexually permissive than our own. Burton also quotes an anatomical speculation to the effect that in individuals enjoying passive anal intercourse, the perianal innervation is so finely organized and so intimately connected to the innervation of the genitals (much more so than in "normal" people) that introduction a posteriori stimulates the sexual innervation as well, resulting in an enhanced sensation of pleasure.<note 10> He cites no evidence, but we may take it to derive from his own observations in the brothels of Karachi and elsewhere, where the "passive" partners gave unequivocal evidence of deriving pleasure from such attentions.<note 11> Passing on to more or less psychological considerations, Burton mentions the possibility that there are predominantly masculine and feminine races influenced somehow (he does not say how) by climate. He justifies this supposition by the actual distribution of the cultures involved the world over, overriding the bounds of race and custom (his word here being "media" which I take to be equivalent to the French "moeurs"). Psychology per se did not exist in Burton's day, either, and his attempt -- like those of Ulrichs -- at least had the merit of being based on observation rather than merely describing actions known only through rumor, or merely shouting about innate sinfulness or the like. As for the origin of boy-love, there is no definite one, according to Burton. It is "lost in the night of ages." He does connect it with certain cults of the Goddess in Egypt, Rome, Asia Minor and elsewhere.<note 12> He ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.7 ------------------------------------ Burton's Terminal Essay 7 also gives a lengthy treatment of the many writers, ancient and modern (to his own day, the 1880's) who had dealt with the subject. Name after name, individuals as well as loving pairs, in the writings of the ancients, are mentioned, mainly from Greek tradition, and largely from the compilations in Meier,' together with a curious glossary.<note 13> The reader is referred to the Essay for this rich compilation, not so easily obtainable elsewhere; and to Eglinton's work, Chapter X. When Burton comes to deal with paiderasty in Rome, he -- like Eglinton -- presents a gloomier picture. Like unto all else they did, the Romans' version of boy-love was a cold and humorless, albeit lustful, sort of exercise. One doubts whether this race of farmer-soldiers, unloving and unlovable, could really feel much for anybody or anything.<note 14> At any rate, their concept of paiderasty lacked the ennobling and uplifting aspects claimed for Greek boy-love. Sensuality, debauchery and downright prostitution characterized the Roman practice. It might be instructive to look at the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (in any of the good translations: Arrowsmith's is perhaps the best) to see just what was the temper of the times in this direction. All is infused by a driving sensuality, and everybody is out to score sexual coups -- with no tenderness. Burton here also gives a glossary of some 90 Latin words connected with paiderasty, but mostly without definitions; one may have difficulty in finding precise equivalents in Latin-English dictionaries.<note 15> So far as Roman colonies were concerned, the practice (says Burton) extended far and wide: "Roman civilization carried pederasty to North Africa, where it took firm root." But one may well wonder if the Roman practice did not merely replace or change existing paiderastic traditions in the Greek colonies overrun by the Romans. Now for the specifically Arabian aspect. Burton quotes the Koran, disclosing a little-known prohibition of homosexual activity therein: sura IV, 20 -- "And if two [men] among you commit the crime, then punish them both."; sura VII, 78 -- "Proceed ye to a fulsome act wherein no creature hath foregone [=preceded] ye? Verily, ye come to men in lieu of women lustfully." This is then joined by several references to the legend of Sodom and Gomorrah. But despite the prohibitions, according to Burton, boy-love prevails everywhere in the Muslim world, and he takes it up country by country, tribe by tribe, discussing the provenance and the ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.8 ------------------------------------ 8 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE extent of paiderasty in each, largely based on his own observations. Whatever his degree of classical scholarship, Burton deserves respect for his close observation of Muslim peoples. Digressing a bit into the history of the religion of the region, Burton correctly identifies it as the land of the androgynous deity and the castrated (or elsewhere merely effeminate) votary, characterizing this as a second stage in the development of Sotadic love -- a stage of superstition. Going farther east, Burton deals with the "Unspeakable Turk," a violent race of "born pederasts," with the Kurds, whom he lets off badly in this regard, and with the Armenians who "as their natural character is, will prostitute themselves for gain, but prefer women to boys." This is damning with faint praise, with a vengeance. One is constrained to wonder just how much of all this is mere fact and how much mere abuse. It verges on the latter and on the merely funny. And so it goes, for page after page of fascinating details, from Iran to Iraq through the Middle East generally -- and with much glee. Passing still further eastward, to India and present-day Pakistan, Burton includes even lovely Kashmir as a sinkhole of "le Vice" (apparently a common catchword of the time). In passing, it may be of interest to note that he claims for Hindus, generally, an "abhorrence" of paiderasty, while citing a case of it (as a rarity) in a Brahmin! Beyond India, as Burton has defined it, the Sotadic Zone becomes broader and includes Turkestan, much of Indo-China, China and Japan, etc. He describes the Chinese as follows: "The Chinese, as far as we know them in the great cities, are omnivorous and omnifutuentes: they are the chosen people of debauchery, and their systematic bestiality with ducks, goats and other animals is equalled only by their pederasty. Kaempfer and Orlof Toree (Voyage en Chine) notice the public houses for boys and youths in China and Japan."<note 16> Maybe so, but such a general description would have to be better documented than is done by Burton. He justly cites the highly-developed erotic literature of China and Japan, but for the rest necessarily depends on travelbooks. The mere fact of high eroticism in a literature written for a pampered and sophisticated class, in a highly organized and civilized culture, is no reason to extend the same judgment to the peasantry. Because Oriental court literature was often homosexual does not mean that one can ascribe similar attitudes or frequencies to other classes. The indictment is too broadly drawn. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.9 ------------------------------------ Burton's Terminal Essay 9 Curiously enough, Burton appears not to have known of the boy-love practised among the Japanese Samurai, so parallel to Greek and Muslim sacred bands: a subject for future study, it is to be hoped. Burton now passes to the Americas (pre- as well as post-Columbian). He includes all of both Continents within his Sotadic Zone, despite the climatic variations; depending on travelbooks, histories, etc., necessarily his theorizing becomes here far less reliable than where he bases it on his own experience. An interesting point he does make is that the paiderastic custom was of comparatively recent origin in Peru of the Incas. The writings of the Spanish ecclesiasts accompanying the Conquistadores deal extensively with the native homosexuality. Their "remedy" for it was on all fours with the miserable ferocity which they applied to the natives in all other ways. Spanish "persuasion" relied heavily on the faggot and the stake in this area. Among Brazilian upper classes "le Vice" was "looked upon as a peccadillo," although in his own time it had been allegedly reduced to more acceptable levels. As for Africa South, outside the Sotadic Zone, Burton states, paiderasty is of sporadic occurrence. But it does occur, especially in some districts of West Africa (Cacongo) where there are extensive lesbian manifestations. The now defunct empire of Dahomey had a corps of Amazonian female soldiers and, for their use, a corresponding corps of prostitutes. Le Vice -- says Burton -- is subject to sporadic outbursts in Europe proper, subsiding between times to a basal level.<note 17> But obviously much difference in frequency is observable from one part of Europe to another. There is a popular supposition (or superstition) in Italy that the average expatriate Englishman is a paiderast<note 18> -- and le Vice is there known as "Il Vizio Inglese." Berlin has long been visited with it, as has Paris, but the latter city is much more tolerant and less concealing, consequently achieving a perhaps unmerited notoriety, for which it is not justly answerable. Do the antic capers of a caste of male prostitutes justify allegations about the noncommercial sex mores of a country? So far as the paiderasty of the Thousand Nights and a Night is concerned, Burton divides it into three forms: 1. The comic form, as in the Tale of Queen Budur (III, 300-306), where it forms the matter of a Rabelaisian jest. 2. The more earnest phase, as illustrated in the episodes dealing with the boy-loving poet Abu-Nowas. This engaging character is depicted, ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.10 ------------------------------------ 10 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE among other escapades, as actively "debauching" three boys (V, 64-69), but on rereading, one is perhaps less inclined to blame him, as the boys show no visible reluctance to being led astray. 3. The homiletic form. In this guise, paiderasty is severely blamed, especially in the Tale of the Reverend Woman (Shaykhah) (V, 154). Burton's final word emphasizes that "obscene" matters in the Nights form only a small part of the whole. He admits that they are dealt with quite frankly, but they are, after all, an open part of the folklore of a free, uninhibited, and non-ascetically-minded people. He points out that in the England of his own day anything in the so-called classics of Greece and Rome was permitted because set down in a learned language (therefore barred to the common people). Translation into plain English was taboo. Though he does not mention it, perhaps a form of intellectual snobbery akin to a mild racism was at work here. Considering its date, we find little to criticize in Burton's Essay. One must remember that he was as well-equipped as most of his contemporaries to deal with the subject; and he was perhaps fortunate in having a less limited and parochial mind than many. One may consider some of his conclusions suspect, mainly the distribution of boy-love according to climate, and his own occasional racist tendencies. Burton's main concept -- the Sotadic Zone itself -- could be called into question on internal evidence alone. Granted that social conditions within his Zone make for a more open display of boy-love, it is erroneous to suppose that the phenomenon is therefore more rarely in evidence elsewhere. Times and manners change, and the reportage thereof 'is -- as always -- inadequate, and in Burton's case also out of date. One is led to suspect that le Vice is as widespread outside his Zone as inside it, but less publicly, or more adequately (through prejudice) hushed up. Similarly, the recent supposed increases in homosexuality of all kinds probably are referable to more efficient statistical reporting rather than to an absolute increase.<note 19> One interesting fact emerges through this study. It appears that there is comparatively little love, but much sensuality, in his Zone -- and out of it as well. We seem to have fallen heir more to the Roman than to the Greek pattern. Why this is so cannot be within the scope of this paper, but rather belongs to a study of the general and relative importance of our Roman vs. our Greek heritage. I have not here attempted to give a substitute for the reading of ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.11 ------------------------------------ Burton's Terminal Essay 11 Burton's Essay (especially Section D), nor have I set down an easy version nor an abridgment nor a popularization. Only a reading of this amazing source itself can suffice any educated person who wishes to become informed on the subject. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.12 ------------------------------------ 12 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE NOTES 1. Based in some part on Payne's and earlier renderings, but more comprehensive both in text and in apparatus criticus. The Terminal Essay constitutes pp.63-260 of volume X; Part D, "Pederasty," is on pp.178-219. It is an amazing macaronic of English, French, Latin and other languages. 2. Sheffield: 1885-88, privately printed for Sir Richard Burton and Leonard Smithers. These men originally published many of their own translations; but "Burton Club" imprints are found on many later anonymous reprints. The commonly available 16-volume Nights is apparently a photo-offset reprint of one of the earlier editions. 3. Burton's note, p.178, Essay. 4. The Perfumed Garden in all translations now available is only half the length of the original, lacking its second half, which was devoted entirely to boy-love. At least two Arabic mss. of the original al-Nafzawi work survive and we hear that a translation is in preparation. 5. Essay, 179. 6. From Meier's article on Paiderastia in the Ersch u. Gruber Allgemeine Encyclopadie der Wissenschaften und Kunste, Leipzig: 1837. This has been reprinted in French translation: M.H.E. Meier and L.R. de Pogey-Castries, Histoire de l'amour grec dans l'antiquite, Paris: Stendhal et Cie., 1930 and later reprints. 7. Greek Love, Chapter X. 8. Possibly Burton was familiar with the Ulrichs pamphlets and was offering what amounted to independent evidence. [JZE] 9. Greek Love, 448-9; Burton, Essay, 210. On early puberty and intermingled cultures, Greek Love, 449. 10. This is from Paolo Mantegazza, L'Amour dans l'Humanite (tr. E. Chesneau), Paris: 1886, etc. 11. Cf. Greek Love, 155-6. 12. Burton, 196-200; cf. Greek Love, 51, 288, 296. 13. The Greek material is excerpted from the essay by Meier (note 6 above), the Latin from Pierre Pierrugues, Glossarium eroticum linguae Latinae, Paris: Dondey-Dupre, 1826. 14. Cf. Greek Love, 223 and Chapter XI. 15. A glossary will be published for Greek and Latin in a subsequent issue of this Journal, supplementary to the fragmentary one in Greek Love. [JZE] 16. Burton, 205. 17. Compare the table in Greek Love, 347. 18. Compare the common gossip quoted in Greek Love, 348: "Nobody could return uncorrupted from a trip to Italy . . ." 19. Cf. Greek Love, 21-22. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.13 ------------------------------------ "Le Vice" In Turkey JONATHAN DRAKE, Beirut ABSTRACT: A historical sketch of the slave traffic in boys in Turkey from about the 14th century until recent decades is presented, with sidelights on training methods for boys destined for brothels. Anthropological and folkloric notes are presented from both modern Greek and Turkish sides. The Turkish mores appear to have been nearer to Roman than to Greek practice, though some affection is known to have existed between such boys and their captors or purchasers. Literary material relevant to this topic is analyzed in some detail. I Even the most objective scholar finds it difficult to write about modem Greeks in a way that is fair to Turks, or about Turks in a way fair to Greeks. We must stress this point from the outset, because so much that we know in the West about boy-love in Turkey has been written about the Turks by their Greek enemies. We must begin by admitting that the Turks have been cruel and vicious soldiers. We cannot forget the Turkish slaughter of more than a million Armenians during World War I. We cannot forget the centuries of Greek suffering at the hands of the Turks, who conquered the Byzantine Empire, looted Greek cities and enslaved their inhabitants. The Greeks were therefore motivated to write horror stories about the Turks in order to rouse Western support for their hopes of liberation from Turkish masters. In reporting Turkish paidophilic excesses, the Greeks were the pot calling the kettle black. But they could rouse the sympathy of Western European nations by telling the truth, albeit in exaggerated form. For since the height of the Roman Empire's conquests, there have probably never been anywhere armies that raped children,' especially boys, on the scale of the Turks.<note 8> At least 8000 Austrian boys who had been taken as catamites for Turkish use during the siege of Vienna were massacred when the siege was abandoned. Bartolomej Dordevic (1510-1566) wrote two documents<note 9> about his experience in Turkish hands. Thirteen times a slave, he was seven times ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.14 ------------------------------------ 14 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE sold. He gives an eloquent description of the march of child slaves from European battlefields to Turkey. Slave buyers followed Turkish armies, each dealer marching 50 to 60 children on foot back to Turkey, manacled hand and foot. At night, he writes, one suffered at hearing the moans and tears of the boy chosen for the night to endure the slave-merchant's lust. Even those as young as seven could not protect themselves from violation, save for the most beautiful 10% who were reserved as gifts for the Sultan. Of these, the ruler took his pick for his own "pleasures against nature"; the rest were presented to friends, put into houses of male prostitution, or sold in the marketplaces. Some historians suggest that Bayezid 1 (1360-1403) discovered the delights of boys, and sent his soldiers all over the areas of conquest to find the most charming youngsters for his harem. From his example, the practice of taking boys sexually spread in the army, among government officials, and through the nobility. One reason why the Turks continued and expanded their wars of conquest was reputedly to keep up the supply of young boys -- especially the beautiful, highly desired European children.<note 38> This, as much as anything else, contributed to European hatred of Turks. Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople, is described<note 38> as a "notorious boy-lover." To rouse up his soldiers to conquer the city he made a speech in which he painted a glowing picture of the booty awaiting the soldiers in Constantinople -- especially the boys, gentle, beautiful, aristocratic young boys, enough for all.<note 23> And indeed there were. The historical record of the capture of the city is full of atrocity stories of rape and enslavement, as adults (especially wealthy nobility) were murdered and their children enslaved, the young boys being taken to soldiers' barracks. The most handsome were reserved for the Sultan, and he purchased some 200 from his soldiers for his own harem. He also heard that the Greek collaborator, the noble Notaras, had an extremely beautiful son of 14. The Sultan demanded the boy for his pleasures. When Notaras refused, he and his whole family were executed and the boy taken to the Sultan's palace.<note 38> Some modern novels written about this event have suggested that the youngster chose to die heroically with his family, but the evidence is that instead he joined the other 200 catamites. Davey<note7> reports that these harem boys, beautifully dressed in feminine costumes, danced at the wedding of the emperor's daughter. Before any boy was taken to the Sultan's bedchamber, he was epilated and dipped in perfume. The 200 appear to have ranged from 8 to 16 years of age; they were given ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.15 ------------------------------------ "Le Vice" in Turkey 15 geisha-like training, consisting of erotic poetry and songs, dancing, literature and "diverse manners of giving pleasures to men." The term "peg-house," for a male house of prostitution, generally thought to have its source in the common shipboard practice of having a young cabin boy sit on a peg to dilate his anus, may date back to this period. For benches have been found, somewhat like school benches, with pegs of various sizes on which boys were evidently required to sit, progressing probably from smaller to larger pegs as they progressed in the study of Turkish literature and song. When the supply of youngsters as war booty began to diminish, the Sultan began his infamous "child tax." Hadden<note 16> reports that the Sultan's representatives visited each village in the European section of the Turkish Empire once every four years and selected the most beautiful boys between 7 and 9 for the army corps, the palace pages' school, and the labor corps. Some authorities give ages 10-12 as the range selected, and there is also controversy as to the extent to which these boys were taken "for purposes at which humanity shudders" in the Sultan's court. But there is no doubt that some successive Sultans were served by catamites with whom they were deeply infatuated. Similarly beyond doubt, in the same period, boys went into the homes of officials and nobles for sexual purposes.<note 38> European boys were not castrated, but were often feminized in training, manners, and costume "to serve the lusts of lecherous masters"; they were preferred because they were, so the story goes, so much more sexually responsive and cooperative than boys of other origins. Much has been written of boy-love in the court of Ali Pasha, Turkish governor of Ioannina in Greece,<note 6> whose agents combed the dominion for the most beautiful children -- killing the parents who refused to allow their sons to serve the governor.<note 34> West European visitors, including Lord Byron<note 32> have described Ali's court, where beautiful boys in long curly hair strutted about in crimson petticoats or paraded naked. Ali regularly bled his boys to keep them "docile, pale and beautiful" -- for which read subdued and weakened.<note 34> These "smooth-limbed young ganymedes" entertained visitors with lewd songs and dances. It is said that Ali could not kiss nor fondle without hurting, and that he and his son, in cruel sport, tried out the various horrors described by the Marquis de Sade. Boys who displeased Ali were sewn in sacks and tossed into the lake, or put into a leopard's cage for the amusement of the court. Ali took pleasure in torturing his boys and in giving them gifts. In the end his downfall ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.16 ------------------------------------ 16 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE came from the Sultan's jealousy. Gossip has it that the Sultan was enraged at Ali's imitating an imperial prerogative by insisting that when a boy came to his bed, he must crawl up from the bottom on his belly. The "poetic description of the Turkish governor and his catamite" (age 15) in George Colman's Don Leon presumably reports Byron's own observations His cheeks were comely and his skin was fair, . . . Not Ganymede, whose all-bewitching shape Could in Olympus sanctify a rape; Not Ali, long the Moslem prophet's joy, Bloomed with such grace as did this Grecian boy. After Mehmed IV abolished the "child tribute," the supply of boys was maintained by an active slave traffic into Turkey. In 1822, some 45,000 Greek captives were distributed to the slave markets. In the 1850's Circassian slave dealers supplied large numbers of children -- often sold by their parents.<note 16> Evidently many Circassians raised children to sell on the market, just as had French peasants in the 9th century. Pfeiffer<note 33> reports making the acquaintance of a Circassian boy whose father had been murdered in clan wars when the boy was six. An enemy of his father then sold the boy to a caravan to Constantinople, where he was resold to a noble, who "employed him for some years in his exercises of pleasure." When the boy resisted or complained, he was bastinadoed with 20 to 50 blows to the feet, hanging head downwards from a rope. This was done so many days in succession that he could hardly walk. (A punishment neither defacing nor permitting escape.) He was also often left in a room without food or water for several days, to make him compliant. The youngster, who "looked exactly like an English boy," had served his master for seven years and now had expected to be freed -- but instead found himself being sold now that his bloom was fading. In 1894, according to Hadden,<note 16> large numbers of the handsomest Armenian boys were taken for immoral purposes. And everywhere, but especially in Asia Minor, Greek children were helpless before the sexual onslaughts of Turks. A Greek would be killed by a mob for raising his hand to a Turk, even in defense of the bodies of his children. Therefore in Asia Minor, even in the early 1900's, many Greek fathers prepared their young sons for anal intercourse (presumably on the part of Turkish captors). The training, according to a scholarly article in Rassegna di studi sessuali<note 29> began at age 7 or 8 and was both mental and physical. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.17 ------------------------------------ "Le Vice" in Turkey 17 Greased wooden cylinders of gradually increasing size were used for anal dilation, being left in nightlong. Almost 90% of Greek boys in Asia Minor reputedly practiced "le Vice" with each other and many were taken to satisfy the lusts of neighboring Turks. Probably no city has been so famous for its boy brothels as Istanbul.<note 38> Boys of various nationalities, especially Greek and European and more recently Russian refugees, pale and curly-headed, dressed in gold embroidered clothes, were once available as abundantly as girls. Stem reports that the number of peg-houses tripled between 1846 and 1904.<note 39> These statistics did not include the Turkish baths, where young boys have traditionally been employed as masseurs and as catamites. Another of the Byron-inspired poems of Colman tells of seeking a brothel where . . . The black-eyed boy his trade unblushing plies, Where in lewd dance . . . His supple haunches wiggling to and fro, With looks voluptuous the thought excites . . . These lust boys in the Turkish brothels were trained in sexual skills to an extent probably never elsewhere equalled, even in the boy brothels of Japan and China, especially in arts of titillation which were devastating in impact even before there was any bodily contact. It is said that these brothels, to the extent that they continue to exist, have preserved the arts developed to their peak of perfection in the Sultans' harems, the entertainments offered in the former sounding much the same as in the latter.<note 31> One traveler told how court pages regaled visitors with a concert, imitating women's voices and dances with most agreeable charm, arousing the most lascivious desires. Another traveler<note 32> described the Sultan himself, seated before a tent, surrounded by beautiful young pages who jump to his service with "degrading subserviency," enjoying a style of feebly effeminate wrestling which was offered in brothels for the titillation of the man in the street. Such is the Greek side of the story of how the "vile Turks" "ravished" great numbers of Christian boys from their homes to serve "vile lusts." II Now for the Turkish side. To what extent are we talking of lust, or was there some love present in this extensive Turkish paidophilia? For ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.18 ------------------------------------ 18 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE the most part we are speaking (at least in the classical era of Turkish history) of boys who were slaves or captives, utterly at the mercy of masters who could do anything with them. Yet, surprisingly enough, these boys were often loyal and faithful to their masters. Arab chieftains were sometimes killed by their catamites, but (with a single clearly nonsexual political exception<note 24>) never a Turk as far as I can discover! Many a Turkish nobleman or businessman could trust his favorite boy more than his own wife, children or employees. In many cases, even as with the Arab sheikhs' love-boys, these kept boys were treated with great respect and with more affection than the Turks' own children.<note 1> They were, of course, segregated in harems, not free to leave; they were required to sing, dance and entertain their masters; they indulged in shameless and unrestrained sexual activities described by Westerners as "continuous orgies." But they were for the most part happy, charmingly affectionate, eagerly erotic and personally loyal. The Turks were a lusty, life-loving people, who found great joy in sex. One would then be foolish to attempt to deny the sexual side of their boy-love relationships. Mary McCarthy, in The Stones of Florence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), commenting on Greek love in the Renaissance, points out that this form of love is characteristic of all thriving mature cultures enjoying wealth and leisure. The Turks of the classical era were on the very crest, and the parallel with Periclean Greeks and Renaissance Italians is strong. If one is to speak of love in that culture, one must understand the context of a conquering male-idolizing culture. If sons and love-boys were alike cruelly treated at times, so too were adored wives and concubines. Sexual excesses characterized all love and all life. The classical Turk was fierce in battle and in bed, but he had a tremendous capacity also for love. Collectively terrifying, individual Turks nevertheless displayed a gentle, kindly, bumblingly affectionate side, doglike in eagerness to please. Adoring boys then sensually even as now more restrainedly, Turks were -- with boys as with women -- not content with their own voluptuousness until they could excite its counterpart in their partners. It is in this light that we can understand their particular predilection for European boys: to beauty was added an unusual (culturally determined) capacity for affection and erotic response -- strangely stronger in antisexual Europe, it seems, than in Muslim lands where sex was taken so much more casually. Turks will admit that boys suffered at slave-dealers' lustful hands; ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.19 ------------------------------------ "Le Vice" in Turkey 19 but then slavers have everywhere been the scum of the earth. However, when a Turkish gentleman purchased a boy for sexual purposes, the boy was in no sense a counterpart of the African or American Negro in slavery. He was instead a member of the family -- albeit by purchase rather than by birth or marriage -- to be loved, to be called "son."<note 1> Favorite boys grew up to marry their masters' daughters, to take over management of businesses, properties, etc. The Sultan's favorite boys often grew up to be generals, governors and high court officials. Stern<note 39> reports (among many similar instances) that Rustem was the love-boy of Suleiman, that the Grand Vizier Silihdar Mehmed Pasha was as a boy a page in the palace who became the beloved of the Sultan, later promoted to positions of power and marrying a daughter of Sultan Mustafa. And as for the notorious "child tax," even though they knew that many of the most charming boys would inevitably find their way into leading citizens' beds to be "ravished and feminized," parents in many Christian villages in the Balkans -- so far from attempting to hide their children -- fought for the privilege of providing them! For they knew, after all, that this was the path for a talented and handsome boy to rise in the government with an assured career. The boys were, in fact, not enslaved but conscripted into palace schools providing the best education available in the realm. These schools taught a variety of languages and gave intensive physical and military training, together with a classical education in what we would call humanities. Rycaut<note 36> gives a thorough picture of the life and discipline in such schools, one of which continues to exist as the school to which aristocratic Turks today send their sons. It has, of course, evolved into a more conventional private preparatory school. Rycaut writes: The Turks make it their chiefest care, that the Prince should be served by such, as owe both the cultivating of their minds and the nourishment of their body's <sic> to him; those youths thus are to be settled for the highest employments, are born of Christian parents, who coming from distant places, have no other interest to espouse, than that of the Grand Signior's. Those must be of good features and looks, and well shap'd, without any defects of Nature . . . (pp.11-12) They are first instructed in modest behavior, being kept under a most severe discipline by the eunuchs, their guardians, who watch every step they take. Rycaut then tells how some boys are selected for the dispensary, to ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.20 ------------------------------------ 20 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE serve the Sultan his drinks, forty being chosen to attend him personally in his chamber. One takes care of his water, one of his coat, one of his dogs, and so forth. Then he says: The doctrine of Platonic love has found its admirers, even among the Turks, under the color of which vertuous passion, they frequently hide their unlawful inclinations . . . , several of the chiefest rank in the Seraglio, having made their addresses to the young pages upon this score, and by degrees allured them into their service. Thus Sultan Morat [Murad IV] became enamour'd of an Armenian boy, and afterwards of a novitiate of Galata, whom he advanc'd to the office of Sword-bearer; as the present Sultan [Mehmed IV] became a slave to the son of a slave, to such a degree, that he made him his chief favourite, never being content without his company. (p.15) The boys in the palace were warned against the dangers of flirting with nobles, army officers, and others in the court, who might take a fancy to them or ask for them as a reward for favors done for the Sultan. But "boys will be boys." The more the eunuchs prevented them from having love affairs among themselves, the more they played the flirting game. The more the tribute boys in the school were warned against the men of the court who eyed them, the more they were tempted to the life of luxury in some courtier's home. In the school they had coarse food and stem discipline; small wonder, then, that few resisted the temptation of seeking to attract the eye of the Sultan or some nobleman. They whispered to each other tantalizing rumors of the Sultan's table and bed, of the wealth and power awaiting those who could win his favor. In the presence of the potentates they "assumed an effeminacy which excites compassion," seeking to win the place of the youngster whose privilege was to stand beside the Sultan's bed fanning away insects. LeRouge<note 25> tells of their curiosity to see the "charming posterior which the Sultan honors with his favors" of whichever young page was the Sultan's current darling. Earlier we described the court of Ali Pasha, with its naked or purple-petticoated dancing boys lewdly entertaining the governor and his guests. Recent research displays the operation of Greek anti-Turkish prejudice in this story too. Granted that some beautiful boys were kidnapped, their resisting parents murdered, still most of the boys came to Ali's court willingly, brought by their parents. Such, too, was true of the boy dancers (batschas) in the harem of the Emir of Bokhara, mentioned by John Gunther in Inside Asia. Parents often wore a gold medal proudly indicating that they had contributed a son to the Emir's corps de ballet. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.21 ------------------------------------ "Le Vice" in Turkey 21 In most matters the Greeks cringed in servile ways before Ali Pasha, ready to gratify his whims for economic or other material advantage. To have a son in the governor's harem was an obvious path to favor and fortune. Not only, then, did parents bring Ali their sons, they taught them lewd dancing to please the governor at first meeting. Similarly did the peasant parents who prepared their boys' posteriors for the inevitable, display these boys to officials whose favor was wanted. When the tax collector came to the farm, he was shown around in the distracting presence of a seductive youngster, attention being quickly diverted from cattle and other taxable items towards the bedroom. Boys so prepared for this task were naturally more available to other comers -- and talked about it. They were understandably tempted to offer themselves in the streets when in need of anything. And according to the Rassegna essay, parents often bragged that their sons had slept with the Bey of so-and-so -- or the police captain. In a culture overly protective of women and girls, boys developed early love affairs among themselves, often secretly dreaming of the man who would love them and bring them luxury. When a possible candidate showed up, force was therefore unnecessary; boys gave themselves eagerly in search of true love, and sometimes indeed they found it. If this was true of free boys, so much more of slaves. Deprived of family and freedom, their sole hope of happiness was in pleasing their masters, their love and devotion putting to shame the masters' lust. Since sex was inevitable, the slave boy's appropriate course was to devote himself to it as an artist and lover. What then is the true picture? To what extent did Greek love exist in classical Turkey? To what extent was the Turks' paidophilia mere sexual exploitation of the helpless? Some of both must be admitted. Among many Turks, playing with boys was a sensual sport, pursued in turkish baths, in peg-houses, in harems, where Greek love is no term to describe casual encounters with bejeweled boys whose grooming, dance and song were calculated to arouse lust, where boys were toys to play with and toss aside. Certainly if one truly loves a boy, he will not wish to see that boy trained to serve indifferently the lust of every Ali, Mehmed and Mustafa, -- trained to use perfume and cosmetics, to undress suggestively, to flirt and dance lewdly, etc., in default of an education which might serve his own adult life. Such training is not calculated to help any boy grow up to be a mature member of a society. We are suggesting that one way to distinguish Greek love from its ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.22 ------------------------------------ 22 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE counterfeit, in or out of Turkey, is to look at the goals the man seeks for his boy. In true Greek love, he will seek to give him the kind of education enabling him to fulfill his capacities, to become a joyous outgoing adult. Some Turks, at least, did rescue many boys from hopelessness, giving them love and first-rate educations. Sex was in a mutual fulfillment context. Perhaps in fiction rather than in history we can better find the meaning of love in a culture: specifically, in the love story. History books all too often make some of the greatest love affairs sound like clinical case records. Unfortunately little translated fiction is available, and I cannot now find the two best novels I ever read on this subject years ago -- both Victorian era stories. (Can some reader identify either?) One was the tale of a "tax child," of his misery and hunger for love after being torn from his family. The boy gradually begins to hate his father, feeling that surely the latter could have done something about it had he wished. How can a 12-year-old understand his father's helplessness before the Turkish throne? The boy feels his father could at least have preferred death for himself and the whole family -- but no, he had willingly let him go, even giving him a nice little lecture on "being a good boy and obeying your new master." As love for father turns to hatred, the boy begins to fall in love with the Turkish army captain, strong, virile, athletic, brave. Once the boy dares say to him, "I wish my father were like you," causing the captain to notice the boy's adoring look. Love breeds love, love offered is hard to accept; but willy-nilly the captain finds himself increasingly falling in love with the boy, finally keeping him for himself. There is no cruelty, only tenderness, deep affection, and the joy of a boy who cannot do enough to please the new master who returns his love. One bizarre little note: the night before the captain takes the boy to bed for the first time, he shows him a torture chamber "to show you what happens to boys who do not please and obey their masters" -- incongruous because obviously unnecessary. The boy is so adoringly infatuated with the captain that he could refuse him nothing. Much the same sort of adoring boy is pictured in Nikos Kazantzakis's The Greek Passion, which begins with the Turkish official's musing over the darling boy who is his comfort and joy. His grief and anguish when ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.23 ------------------------------------ "Le Vice" in Turkey 23 this boy is murdered by his Greek enemies is unmistakable, matched by the love shown in the boy's earlier songs, gestures, affectionate glances. Though the film He Who Must Die ignores this phase of the story, the boy's affectionate glances are present in its opening scenes. Some may disagree with my interpretation of Kyra Kyralina,<note 20> but I believe my view defensible. I see it as a work of nostalgia. A man corrupted by later experiences of vice -- as for example his teenage prison experience wherein he was used sexually by all his mates -- looks back with mixed emotions to the two romances he had with men when he was a young boy. The book has the authentic ring of autobiography, confirmed in a note by Romain Rolland in the French paperback edition, telling how the author was a vagabond in Turkey from age 12, "possessed by passions" like his novel's young hero, who had been rather willingly kidnapped at 11 by one Nazim Effendi, a boat captain in the business of "furnishing flesh for harems." Istrati tells the story as an older man, recalling how he "delivered himself body and soul into the hands of this protector." Three days he went aboard the ship anchored in the river near his home. "We ate delicious cakes, danced, and amused ourselves . . . in intimate ways without blushing." The boy was so pleased with the Effendi's attentions and with the beautiful clothing he was given to wear aboard, that he was tempted to beg to be allowed to sail with the ship. The first two days he allowed the captain to undress him and put away the beautiful clothes, at night remembering the intimacies at the hands of his sexually skillful friend. Perhaps he would not have sailed on the third day had he not gotten into some trouble at home . . . but again he might have. He quickly became habituated to the new life of opium and "vice." "Vice" is his term for sex, but he confesses that he greatly enjoyed the bed and affections of the Effendi. In this world (says he) a man can become accustomed to anything, but nothing so easily as vice when one truly loves and is loved. The blond Rumanian boy basked in his life on ship as the captain's favorite, dressed like a young prince with a gold watch, seated on a cushion embroidered with gold thread, eating baklava and drinking coffee from superb finjans, reveling in the smiles and caresses of his ravisher. The first night he knelt and kissed the captain's knees for joy, thinking himself enroute to heaven as he was bent to serve the ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.24 ------------------------------------ 24 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE pleasures of his benefactor, who taught him new tastes and new desires until he was completely converted . . . Four years he shared the Effendi's bed. When he found a chance to run away, it was because the ship was docked at Istanbul and he believed his mother to be nearby. There he quickly fell instead into the hands of a Bey, who became deeply infatuated with him, so passionately that he devoted almost full time to the boy's amusement: gifts of a dog, a horse, jewelry, a pipe, even girls. The Bey lacked the Effendi's slyness, violence and "wickedness," but caressed him with "true and sincere love" and "narcotic voluptuousness." The boy again felt himself a prisoner of love, even as before, but he could not resist responding to the Bey's tenderness. These clever Turks (he reports) know how to get what they want, one way or another. "There are several ways to conquer a passionate soul and the easiest is to speak tenderly. It was easy for him, for he loved me sincerely; but the devil teaches sincerity to the passionate!" But he adds, "By having me guarded always by a servant armed to the teeth, he violated my last expression of love." So the boy ran away again, to the life of a vagabond knowing only the brutal sex life of the road with none of the love of his two protectors. Does he not feel, in retrospect, that he should have stayed with Nazim Effendi and mutual love? III In conclusion, then, do we find lust or love? Probably classical Turkish boy-love should not be called true Greek love -- rather a love nourished in sensual lust. Yet at points it does approach Greek love when there is deep reciprocal affection, when each actively desires the fulfilment of the other, when the man seeks to nurture the boy, to raise him as a man able to use his talents maturely. We note an interesting paradox, which we will explore further in another essay. Many men believe that tenderness to their sons produces sissies. Turkish evidence suggests rather that the boys loved most tenderly grew into the most virile men, those used most brutally became effeminates. Tenderness did not mean sexual restraint or abstention. In an atmosphere where sex was accepted and enjoyed, even brutal selfish sex was sometimes a natural accompaniment -- or prelude -- to masculine love. As for the boys, they grumbled about slavery, about having to work or study (even as today) but they rarely grumbled about sex -- save perhaps ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.25 ------------------------------------ "Le Vice" in Turkey 25 to suggest that the master spent too much time with his women. Even sex at first forcible could sometimes grow into love. In the West where we hear always that sex should only follow love, we tend to forget that sex can nurture or stimulate love. Many a master who thought he wanted a boy only for sex ended up loving him madly. And cannot a boy find sex also a path to love? Classical Turks had a saying: "Fear makes a boy into a woman, love makes him into a man." They taught that he who loves a boy should lead him through several stages of sexual enjoyment. (1) Receiving caresses and compliments, teaching him to blush and enjoy his body's bloom. (2) Arousing, teaching him joy in his penile desires. (3) Kissing, enjoying his partner's arousal. (4) Anticipation, whetted by fitting words and tickling of intimate regions. (5) Desire: the boy's penis is titillated, the man's member is pressed against the boy's anus. (6) Coitus: the boy forgets himself, the man does as he will, teasing the boy's penis only. (7) Climax: the man seizes the boy's penis as a handle, in the Greek manner, to control the boy's movements and bring him if possible to simultaneous ejaculation. (8) Afterplay: fellation by the boy. (9) Waiting: the boy is attentive for signs of renewed interest. (10) Hoping: the boy comes to sit on his lover's lap, or climbs in bed beside him in preparation for another cycle. These stages were much the same in the brothel, in the field where a captured boy would be sleeping with his soldier captor and learning them from him, in the judge's house or the slave merchant's quarters; the same whether the boy was loved or merely lusted after. Listening to talk of these stages, or reading about them, led Western observers to judge that all was lust and none love, and to write the notes used in anti-Turkish polemics. But in this propaganda even as in the history books, real love affairs had a way of being reduced to a few lines of heartless journalism. Whether or not the reader decides that in any given instance Greek love was present, I nevertheless suggest that often the heart of man and boy shared in the love-making, with richness of affection and emotion which gave them abiding joy, richness of companionship, and which nurtured a love overriding and transforming the stages of sexual passion into tender acts of mutual adoration. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.26 ------------------------------------ 26 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. AMIN, A., "Homosexuality in the Near East," Sesso e liberta, Milan, n.d. 2. AUDISIO, GABRIEL, La vie de Haroun-al-Raschid. Paris: Gallimard, 1930. 3. BAUDIER, MICHEL, Histoire generalle du serrail, et de la cour du Grand Seigneur, Empereur des Turcs. Paris: C. Cramoisy, 1624. 4. BUSBECQ, OGIER GHISELIN DE, Life and Letters. London: Kegan Paul, 1881. 5. CHALCOCONDYLES, LAONICUS, Histoire generale des Turcs, In Blaise de Vigenaire. Paris: A. Courbe, 1662. 6. CHRISTOWE, STOYAN, Lion of Yanina. New York: Modern Age, 1941. 7. DAVEY, RICHARD, The Sultan and his Subjects. London: Chatto & Windus, 1907. 8. DERNSCHWAM, HANS, Tagebuch einer Reise nach Konstantinopel und Kleinasien 1553/55. Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1923. 9. DORDEVIC, BARTOLOMEJ, De Turcarum moribus Epitome. Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1553; London: 1660. 10. EVERSLEY, GEORGE JOHN SHAW LEFEVRE, BARON, The Turkish Empire from 1288 to 1914. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923. 11. FERRIERES-SAUVEBOEUF, LOUIS-FRANCOIS DE, Memoires historiques, politiques, et geographiques des voyages faits en Turquie, en Perse et en Arabie. Paris: Buisson, 1790. 12. GABRIEL, ALBERT, Voyages archeologiques dans la Turquie orientale. Paris: E. de Boccard, 1940. 13. GEUFFROY, ANTOINE, Aulae Turcicae, Othomannicique Imperii Descriptio. Basel: Sebastian Henricpetri, 1573. 14. GIOVIO, PAOLO, Commentarii delle cose de' Turchi. Venice: Casa de' figliuoli di Aldo, 1541. 15. GUER, JEAN-ANTOINE, Moeurs et usages des Turcs. Paris: Coustelier, 1746-47. 16. HADDEN, ALEXANDER, The Ottoman Dynasty. New York: 1916. 17. HAMMER-PURGSTALL, JOSEPH VON, Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches. Pest: C.A. Hartleben, 1827-35. 18. HERNE, FRANCIS, A Residence in Greece and Turkey. London: Whittaker, 1837. 19. HUBBARD, GILBERT ERNEST, Day of the Crescent. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1920. 20. ISTRATI, PANAIT, Kyra Kyralina. Paris: Rieder, 1924; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. 21. KINROSS, JOHN PATRICK DOUGLAS BALFOUR, BARON, Ataturk; A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, Father of Modern Turkey. New York: Morrow, 1965. 22. KLEIN, M., Die Prostitution in Konstantinopel. Berlin: 1914. 23. KNIGHT, GEORGE WILSON, Lord Byron's Marriage: The Evidence of Asterisks. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957. 24. KRITOBOULOS, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, tr. Charles T. Riggs. Princeton: At the University Press, 1954. 25. LEROUGE, GUSTAVE, La Turquie: Mariage, adultere, prostitution, anthologie amoureuse. Paris: H. Daragon, 1912. 26. MERRIMAN, ROGER BIGELOW, Suleiman the Magnificent, 1520-1566. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944. 27. MILLER, BARNETTE, Beyond the Sublime Porte: The Grand Seraglio of Stambul. London: Oxford University Press, 1931. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.27 ------------------------------------ "Le Vice" in Turkey 27 28. NICOLAY, NICOLAS DE, The Navigations, Peregrinations and Voyages, Made into Turkey, tr. T. Washington the Younger, in: A Collection of Voyages and Travels. London: Thomas Osborne, 1745, Vol.1, pp.553-708. 29. OLEGNA, R., "11 catechismo turco e l'omosessualita," Rassegna di studi sessuali, 2: 354-56 (1922). 30. PALLIS, ALEXANDER ANASTASIUS, In the Days of the Janissaries: Old Turkish Life as Depicted in the "Travel-Book" of Evliya Chelebi. London: Hutchinson, 1951. 31. PENZER, NORMAN MOSLEY, The Harem. London: C. G. Harrap, 1936. 32. PERTUSIER, CHARLES, "Picturesque Promenades in and near Constantinople," in: New Voyages and Travels, vol.4. London: Richard Phillips, 1820. 33. PFEIFFER, G. SIMON FRIEDRICH, The Voyages and Five Years' Captivity in Algiers, tr. I. Daniel Rupp. Harrisburg: J. Winebrenner, 1836. 34. PLOMER, WILLIAM CHARLES FRANKLYN, Ali the Lion. London: Jonathan Cape, 1936. 35. POUQUEVILLE, FRANCOIS-CHARLES-HUGUES-LAURENT, Travels through the Morea, Albania, and Several Other Parts of the Ottoman Empire, to Constantinople. London: Richard Phillips, 1806. 36. RYCAUT, PAUL, The History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire. London: I. Cleave, 1701. 37. SNOUCK HURGRONJE, CHRISTIAAN, Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th Century, tr. J.H. Monahan. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1931. 38. STERN, BERNHARD, Medizin, Aberglaube und Geschlechtsleben in der Turkei. Berlin: H. Barsdorf, 1903. 39. STERN, BERNHARD, The Scented Garden: Anthology of the Sex Life in the Levant. New York: American Ethnological Press, 1934. <ARCHIVIST'S NOTE: in Note 39 the word "Anthology" should be "Anthropology"> 40. TAVERNIER, JEAN-BAPTISTE, A New Relation of the Inner-Part of the Grand Seignor's Seraglio, in: The Six Voyages, In J. Phillips. London: Robert Littlebury and Moses Pitt, 1678. 41. TOTT, FRANCOIS DE, Memoirs. London: J. Jarvis, 1785. 42. WITHERS, ROBERT, A Description of the Grand Signor's Seraglio, ed. John Greaves. London: John Martin and John Ridley, 1650. 43. WITTLIN, ALMA STEPHANIE, Abdul Hamid, tr. Norman Denny. London: John Lane, 1940. 44. YOUNG, ALEXANDER M., Children in the Middle Ages. London: 1877. 45. YOUNG, ALEXANDER M., Traders in Children. London: 1870. 46. YOUNG, ALEXANDER M., Traffic to the East; The Children's Crusade and After. London: 1874. 47. ZWEMER, SAMUEL MARINUS, Childhood in the Moslem World. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1915. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.28 ------------------------------------ Paidikion: A Paiderastic Manuscript TOBY HAMMOND, London ABSTRACT: Erotica devoted primarily to paiderastic practices are rare and principally found not as printed matter but as privately circulated mss. A remarkable specimen of this kind is described and its author's identity deduced from internal evidence. Far and wide though we may search in the annals of erotic literature of all countries, it is seldom possible to find works entirely or principally of paiderastic nature. To be sure, mention is often made of such practices, but ordinarily such mention is followed by the author's editorial disapproval of the acts just recounted. The locus classicus is, of course, the scene in John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (commonly known as "Fanny Hill"), expurgated from most editions of this work save for the recent Olympia Press reprint and one eighteenth century edition cited by Ashbee, Catena Librorum Tacendorum, 60-61. 1 have compared the Ashbee text and the Olympia Press version and they are substantially identical; I quote for convenience. Fanny Hill is describing things she saw through a keyhole at Hampton Court: . . . They now proceeded to such lengths as soon satisfied me what they were. For presently the eldest unbuttoned the other's breeches, and removing the linen barrier, brought out to view a white shaft, middle sized, and scarce fledged, when after handling and playing with it a little, with other dalliance, all received by the boy without other opposition than certain wayward coynesses, ten times more alluring than repulsive, he got him to turn around, with his face from him, to a chair that stood hard by, when knowing, I suppose, his office, the Ganymede now obsequiously leaned his head against the back of it, and projecting his body, made a fair mark, still covered with his shirt, as he thus stood in a side view to me, but fronting his companion, who, presently unmasking his battery, produced an engine that certainly deserved to be put to a better use, and very fit to confirm me in my disbelief of the possibility of things being pushed to odious extremities which I had built on ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.29 ------------------------------------ Paidikion: A Paiderastic Manuscript 29 the disproportion of parts; but this disbelief I was now to be cured of, as by my consent all young men should likewise be, that their innocence may not be betrayed into such snares, for want of knowing the extent of their danger, for nothing is more certain than that ignorance of a vice is by no means a guard against it. Slipping, then, aside the young lad's shirt, and tucking it up under his cloaths behind, he skewed to the open air those globular fleshy eminences that compose the Mount Pleasants of Rome,<note 1> and which now, with all the narrow vale that intersects them, stood displayed and exposed to his attack, nor could I without a shudder behold the dispositions he made for it. First, then, moistening well with spittle his instrument, obviously to make it glib; he pointed, he introduced it, as I could plainly discern, not only from its direction, and my losing sight of it, but by the writhing, twisting, and soft murmured complaints of the young sufferer; but at length, the first straights of entrance being pretty well got through, everything seemed to move and go pretty currently on, as a carpet road, without much rub or resistance; and now, passing one hand round his minion's hips, he got hold of his red-topped ivory toy, that stood perfectly stiff, and skewed, that if he was like his mother behind, he was like his father before; this he diverted himself with, whilst with the other he wantoned with his hair, and leaning forward over his back, drew his face, from the boy shook the loose curls that fell over it, in the posture he stood him in, and brought him towards his, so as to receive a long breathed kiss; after which, renewing his driving, and thus continuing to harass his rear, the height of the fit came on with its usual symptoms, and dismissed the action. The criminal scene they acted I had the patience to see to the end . . . Even homoerotic works of erotica are far from common. Teleny, falsely ascribed to Oscar Wilde, is possibly the most familiar of these, through its recent Olympia Press reprinting. Nowadays we may be regaled with such fare as L'Erotin, En Pension, Paris: "Isidore Liseux," 1954, an entertaining work about a young boy disguised as a girl at a convent school, who seduces a master not unwilling to perform the sexual act in spite of his discovery of the youth's sex, or the recent dull and crapulous Orgie a Rio, but again, neither work is devoted entirely to paiderasty, although the authors' admonishments appear nowadays to have been dropped. The most often seen examples of homosexual erotica circulate in manuscript form, carbon-copied, or mimeographed. The majority of these have to do with orgies among young men in their twenties or, as in Seven in a Barn, teenagers. Paiderasty is all but unknown in this genre. We could have wished for some mention, at least, of the matter in the quite excellently written Josefine Mutzenbacher oder die Geschichte einer Wienerischer Dirne (1906), ascribed to Felix Salten, author of ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.30 ------------------------------------ 30 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE Bambi, and translated (Paris: n.p., 1931) as Josefine Mutzenbacher: the Memoirs of a Viennese Prostitute. Few of the characters are over sixteen years old, and the incidents are well-told and amusing, but paiderastic material is, alas, absent. The present author has recently been allowed to examine a ms. which, were it published or publishable, would more than fill this lacuna in the annals of erotica. The ms. is now in a private collection in London, the owner having purchased it for a considerable sum of money from a bookseller who, it is rumored, paid half-a-crown for it in the Charing Cross Road. Such stories are common in book-collecting circles, and I would be inclined to disbelieve the tale were it not for the fact that the binding is so unprepossessing that the ms. might easily have been thrown unopened onto a sixpenny stall. A detailed description follows. The manuscript is written in a blank ruled notebook, small quarto, bound -- after the style of a bible! -- in semi-stiff dark green roan boards. It is lettered only on the front cover, PAIDIKION. Pagination by the author in ms., [ii], 1-570. Title page: [in red:] PAIDIKION / VOL I [in black:] AN ANTHOLOGY OR THE BOOK OF / [in red:] HYAKINTHOS / AND / NARKISSOS / [in black:] [small vignette of male sex organs] / WITH THIRTEEN FULL PAGE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM LIFE / Evidently some mutilation occurred, as only eight plates are present. They are: 1. Frontispiece: A youth in toga and thonged sandals, rubber-stamped on verso 'Vicenzo Galdi, Via Campania lett: B, Roma.' 2. Facing p.80: A nude youth outside a cave, verso blank but for the pencilled number 1211. 3. Facing p.178: A nude youth reclining on a sofa, verso blank. 4. Laid-down on p.[183]: A nude boy sitting in an armchair, one leg seductively raised. 5. Laid-down on p.[219]: A nude boy and youth both sitting on a trapeze. The number 90 is faintly visible in one corner. 6. Facing p.250: A nude boy standing. Erased, but partly visible on the torso is the number 815 and the date 5-9-1910. 7. Laid-down on p.[521]: An amazing photograph of a nude boy lying face-up on a bed, his waist-length hair flowing back over the pillow.<note 2> The number 297 is on the print. 8. Facing p.548: A nude boy leaning against a stone urn in a garden. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.31 ------------------------------------ Paidikion: A Paiderastic Manuscript 31 On the verso is a rubber-stamped caption 'W.V. Gloeden, 20 1 09. Taormina. Sicilia, Piazza S. Domenico 6' and a crayoned number 747.<note 3> There are two further illustrations aside from tiny erotic vignettes in pen-and-ink: a small original water-color of a young boy in an Eton collar is laid-down on p.250; and a small photograph of the head of a boy with a bandanna round his brow is laid-down on p.401. The manuscript is clearly written in a small neat hand in black ink, with pagination and running titles in red ink at the head of each page. Contents follow: p.1: Dedication. A fourteen-line poem in rhyming couplets. p.2: "The Beloved Name." A list of translations of the word "Boy" in 24 languages. Spaces are left for the word in 13 other languages to be inserted. p.3: "The Thirty Three Joys of Paiderasty and their Symbols." This is a list of 33 different forms of sexual practices with boys, each of which is given a symbol. These symbols are used on pp.560-566 (see below). pp.4-33: "Nox Amoris: a Fragment." A prose story, probably factual, of the first sexual experience of a young man with a soldier in the Horse Guards. pp.34-35: "Carmina Priapeia of Petronius Arbiter." An English translation. pp.36-77: "Amorous Education: a School Story." A delightful and amusing tale of a schoolmaster who must teach his nine pupils, aged between 14 and 17, the arts of paiderastic love, and naturally succeeds with every one. p.78: "Two Pathan Love Songs to his Boy." p.79: "Measurements of the Young Male Body." pp.80-139: "The Island: a Study in Solitude." A tale of a man shipwrecked on a desert island with a 17-year-old youth. He spies the youth masturbating and tries to force him to submit. The youth refuses, is bound and erotically whipped whereon he yields himself to the man. In the night the youth escapes and commits suicide. An act of necrophilia follows and the man severs the youth's sexual organ from the dead body: "And this one relic of the Island is with me now as I write." p.140: "Ten Little Bugger Boys." A 20-line doggerel verse in rhyming couplets. pp.141-158: "Nel Bagno: a Neapolitan Tale." The hero visits a turkish bath in Naples where he is seduced by the 16-year-old attendant. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.32 ------------------------------------ 32 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE The ensuing scenes are of masturbation, fellatio, coprolagnia and urolagnia. pp.159-167: "Laddie: an Episode." A tale of paiderasty among tramps, clearly influenced by 'Josiah Flynt's' "Homosexuality among Tramps" which forms Appendix A in Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion.<note 4> pp.168-249: "Floreat Etona: or, Where Waterloo Was Won." An incredibly detailed story, with numerous erotic scenes, between the hero, who calls himself Julius, and Douglas, aged 16, and Philip, aged 14, two Eton schoolboys. Philip, in the course of the narrative, tells a tale of his visit to another Etonian where he is involved in an orgy with foreign boys and animals. pp.250-387: "The Furnace: an Autobiography in which is set forth the Secret Diversions of a Paiderast." A poem, in rhyming couplets, of 2706 lines. There can be nothing similar to this achievement in any erotic work. Considering that the author was an amateur poet, it is a fine effort, by far the best-written section in the book, and completely autobiographical. While the author's name is not given, certain clues lead us to his identity, as will be seen later. pp.388-487: "Simla: the Tale of a Secret Society." A long story concerning the hero's encounter with Eric, a 13-year-old schoolboy. He introduces two other boys, Foster, 17, and Fred, 16. Every possible sexual act is performed. pp.488-559: "Kid: the Strange Story of a Bugger-Boy." Kid, a homeless 13-year-old orphan, is seduced by a man. The following night, after an orgy of solitary masturbation in a public park, he is accosted by a friend of his original seducer and taken to a "peg-house" or brothel staffed by boys. There he is immediately taken up by 13-year-old Tommy, a public school boy who works at the brothel in the holidays, and is taught all manner of ways of delighting his customers. At the end is written "Continued in Volume II," but I do not believe another volume was written. pp.560-566: "Paidology." This is a list of boys with whom the author of the ms. has had affairs. The list is divided into eight columns: (1) The number of the boy on the list, totaling 129. (2) Age. (3.) Place. (4) Date. This ranges from 1897 to 1917. (5) Name. Usually only first names are given, but there are a few exceptions. (6) Race. (7) References. This is a list of symbols referring back to page 3 of the ms. and one can at once tell the physical practices performed by the author and each indi- ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.33 ------------------------------------ Paidikion: A Paiderastic Manuscript 33 vidual boy-friend. (8) An unidentifiable column of numbers which range from 1 to 93. Occasionally there are superscript digits, e.g. 7<superscript 2> or 1<superscript 1>. I take this to mean, possibly, the number of separate times meetings took place and the superscript digits to refer to the number of orgasms achieved at one session. At the bottom of each page an average is taken of the ages of the boys; this never rises above 15.8. The figures in the mysterious final column are also added at the foot of each page. The youngest boys are aged seven, one being a Muslim boy named Rahimbu whom the author merely handled, the other an Arab named Mohammed Ali with whom he practised mutual masturbation, fellation and anal intercourse. From the manuscript's details we can identify the unnamed author. In the "Paidology" we learn that he had his first sexual experience in 1897 at Charterhouse School with a boy called Stanley. This is confirmed by the autobiographical poem, "The Furnace": "We loved each other . . . Stanley Winch and I." In the register of boys at Charterhouse School,<note 5> we find Winch recorded thus: "WINCH, Stanley Brooke, b. Nov. 1883. (Hodgsonites)." "Hodgsonites"<note 6> is the name of the house in which Stanley Winch was boarding. Now it is without question that the author of the ms. occupied the same house, since he describes sexual encounters in the dormitory: That night when "Tommy Page"<note 7> had gone his rounds And I'd made certain from the various sounds About my cubicle that all fast slept Across the passage on bare feet I crept, Stifling the tumult of my beating heart Lest someone wake and hear it and the part That I was playing -- lover or beloved I cannot say -- be quickly known. I shoved A little nervously at Stanley's door And like a ghost I slid within and saw My darling's length upon the shadowy bed His white arms locked behind his golden head The gleaming outline of his naked frame Just visible, no more. I spoke his name In lowest whisper and he whispered back, "Why, Ken, old boy . . . you are so beastly slack "I thought you were not coming!" But he took My trembling body to his breast. From the third-from-last line in the above passage, and from certain ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.34 ------------------------------------ 34 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE other sections in the work, we learn that the author's christian name was "Ken." Now, the only "Kenneth" in this particular house at Charterhouse school around 1897, which date appears beside Stanley's name in the "Paidology" section, is one Arthur Kenneth Searight. And this is, indeed, our author. He was born in 1883, which makes him also around 14 at the time of his sexual encounter with Stanley Winch, and he left Charterhouse in 1900 to go to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. From there, by means of the Army List, his career can be traced. He became a Second Lieutenant in the Royal West Kent regiment on October 12, 1907, and was promoted to Captain on September 1, 1914. He was temporarily Railway Transport Officer, India, during a few months in 1914; and in June 1918 he was drafted to the Mesopotamia Expeditionary Force. These postings are completely consistent with the places mentioned in the "Paidology" sections.<note 8> The author's identity was clinched by my discovery of a copy of his only commercially published work, Sona,<note 9> at the London Library. This copy bears a presentation inscription in Searight's hand, dated November 1943, which exactly matches the calligraphy in Paidikion. Nor is the fact that the semanticist C.K. Ogden contributed a Preface to Sona entirely without interest here.<note 10> Ogden is believed to have been the owner, at one time, of the renowned 'Venice Letters' of Frederick Rolfe, "Baron Corvo." These letters, devoted to the same subject as that which interested Kenneth Searight, are described by Rolfe's biographer A.J.A. Symons as treating "in language that omitted nothing, of the criminal delights that waited for the ignoble sensualist to whom they were addressed, in the Italian city from which his correspondent wrote."<note 11> One may speculate that Ogden became possessed of Paidikion to add to his library of books and manuscripts on such subjects. How it got onto a remainder stall is anyone's guess. Searight is capable of portraying all kinds of emotions and actions, much in the manner of Petronius Arbiter. There is grossness of a thoroughly Roman order, as in this example from Floreat Etona: . . . It was awfully funny to see all those boys lolling about and eating and drinking stark naked! Lord Arthur made Jacques soak his whopping great cock in champagne and then sucked it dry. [Follows a recital of similar antics with the other boys, and others involving an oyster and anilinctus.] . . . in fact, seeing him do this made us all frightfully keen to try the same trick, which we all did till we rolled about on the cushions shrieking with laughter! ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.35 ------------------------------------ Paidikion: A Paiderastic Manuscript 35 But he can also be mildly and engagingly erotic: I unbuttoned the top button of his trowsers . . . I was trembling like a leaf and I thought I detected a tremor pass through the boy in sympathy. "What are you doing?" he asked, the bare arm which encircled my neck tightening its hold unconsciously. "You know very well," I replied . . . Then I undid the remaining button, opened the front of his trowsers and the next moment my fingers were curling themselves rapturously in the thick bunch of hair, sliding over the quickly stiffening length of his boyish member and squeezing gently, caressingly . . . (Simla) He can also write of love: When he had gone, I turned back into my bedroom with an altogether new sense of lonliness [sic]. This shock headed, grey eyed boy of thirteen had sprung into my life like a meteor, bringing with him a trail of fire. I looked at my books, standing in a row on my writing table. Last night I had welcomed this "after tea hour" as a precious hour for study. Why was I so restless now? Why did I not want to study? Wherever I looked, why did Eric's pale, rather un-English face appear like a vision? (Simla) And he can be just amusingly coarse: Ten little Bugger Boys, drinking deep of wine Got so tight at Fitz' Bar they counted only nine; Nine little Bugger Boys, finding it was late Left a lad in Leicester Square: and then there were eight. Eight little Bugger Boys, dreaming still of heaven, Met a lusty sodomite: and then there were seven. Seven little Bugger Boys, in an awkward fix, Saw a copper standing by: and then there were six. Six little Bugger Boys -- all now left alive -- Buggered one another till they only reckoned five! Five little Bugger Boys, bottoms very sore, Played at tossing Freddy off until there were four. . .. (Ten Little Bugger Boys) But we must beware of considering Paidikion to be nothing more than an obscene omnium gatherum. As Searight himself says in Nel Bagno: Yes, you may shudder, you may turn from me in loathing, in disgust. But we are all of us God and brute beast. I was learning to what depths the lusts of human nature could descend. Paidikion, whatever else it may be called, is a clinical observation, in fictional and poetic form, of the erotic stimulus which can be experienced between man and boy. It is much more than that: it is a Petroniesque chronicle of what may be called erotic folkways among some of ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.36 ------------------------------------ 36 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE the more overt paiderasts in late 19th and early 20th century Britain and British Colonies. It is also significant in its parallel to Lord Byron, considered simply as a case history. Here there is no fabled seduction of an innocent boy by an old roue, turning the boy into a rakehell. Rather, the boy loves another boy at school, then wanders through many countries trying to recapture the magic of that initial experience. We may deplore the substitution in his life whereby he searched ever for new experience rather than settling down in proper Greek fashion with a long-term boyfriend, rather than becoming husband and father as well as lover. But we cannot deny the clinical and anthropological value of such a manuscript as this. Should publication sometime become possible, a more detailed study will follow. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.37 ------------------------------------ Paidikion: A Paiderastic Manuscript 37 NOTES 1. "The Mount Pleasants of Rome": evidently Cleland's slap at Italian mores of the period, where boys and queens and female impersonators were always available, often for a price, and where buggery, the most taboo of all sexual techniques among Britons, was commonly accepted. 2. Possibly of German origin. There was, in the 1880's, a fashion in Germany for having pretty boys let their hair grow to amazing length, to be cut short only when they became of military age. Bronze statuettes of this period, dated and signed, record this as plainly as could any photograph. 3. Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856-1931) lived in Taormina and made a living by selling photographs of the town's youthful population. I hope to contribute an article on him in a future number of this periodical. 4. Pages 359-367. Most readily available in volume one of Studies in the Psychology of Sex, New York: Random House, var. eds. 5. Charterhouse Register 1872-1900, Godalming: R.B. Stebman, 1904, p.475. 6. Named after the original housemaster, Rev. J.T. Hodgson, who died on Sept. 3, 1880. 7. Thomas E. Page became housemaster of Hodgsonites in 1881. 8. For an account of the regimental history in India and Mesopotamia at this period, see Capt. C.T. Atkinson, The Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment -- 1914-1919, London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1924. 9. Kenneth Searight, Sona: an Auxiliary Neutral Language, London: Kegan Paul, 1935; introduction by C.K. Ogden. Searight's interest in comparative languages is clearly shown not only in this book but in the section "The Beloved Name" in Paidikion where he lists the word "Boy" in 24 languages. 10. This is the C.K. Ogden perhaps best known for The Meaning of Meaning (with I.A. Richards), Routledge, 1936. 11. A.J. Symons, The Quest for Corvo: an Experiment in Biography, London: Cassell, 1934, p.12. The originals of these letters, addressed to C. Masson Fox, a timber-merchant living in Falmouth, are now in an American college library; an imperfect typescript, lately offered by Phoenix Bookshop, has been bought by the Bodleian Library. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.38 ------------------------------------ Admissions of a Director of Admissions ANONYMOUS, New England ABSTRACT: Personal reminiscences and comments on the "sublimation" demanded of personnel in a private school for boys. Like the late Dr. Robert Lindner and the authors of Gestalt Therapy, I have come to believe that "sublimation" is not only impossible, it is not even a valid concept. Attempting to live a life of "sublimation," on no matter whose advice, has afforded me only frustration, assorted neuroses, and the beginnings of an ulcer. Following an Ivy League career and a few years with the Foreign Service, where nothing more adverse than suspicion ever touched me, I decided against continuing with either government or private industry. And so, three years ago, in much the manner of a postulant at a monastery who seeks to give his life to God, I entered a boys' boarding school to give my life to boys. Boys . . . I was there but a month when a 12-year-old faunet sought solace from me, coming to me after "lights out." He asked that I explain the nature of the "sickness" of a teacher of his in a school from which he was withdrawn in Switzerland, a boys' school which closed following disclosure of the sexual involvement of a teacher with several of his students, -- a "sick" teacher. Perhaps Rick, the boy, was truly puzzled; more likely, he was intrigued and interested in learning more. But after three of these night sessions and the first signs of mutual emotional intoxication, I referred Rick to the school pediatrician, and kept my distance. Boys . . . As I walked down the dormitory corridor last fall absent-mindedly singing "Close your eyes and I'll kiss you" (Beatlemania was then at its height, and the group's first record was the dorm's perpetual background music), a smooth-skinned stripling in the process of changing for sports, leaned out of his room and sang suggestively in his soprano voice, "I bet you would . . ." ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.39 ------------------------------------ Admissions of a Director of Admissions 39 Boys . . . It's almost bedtime, and Phil appears in ripped pajamas which do little to hide his budding masculinity: "Why do you always look down there, sir?" A subtle grin, and the subject is switched to "a letter I just got from my girl. You wanta see it?" I read the letter absently, kid Phil, run my knuckles down his backbone playfully. "Do that again, sir. That feels good. . ." Boys . . . Bickering is a favorite pastime . . . "You queer!" . . . "You don't even know what that means" . . . "That" (says a third boy) "is when a boy likes another boy. . . . Here the conversation drops, but the first boy gives evidence of being clearly puzzled why he and the friends he learned it from should use the word with such a derogatory emphasis! I teach, coach, counsel, befriend . . . and love these boys. But this love is a veiled, distant, unfulfilled love, with reams left unsaid for fear of the destructive power of emotion in boy-man relations in the traditional American boarding school, a monastic microcosmos that paradoxically insists on the value of close "teacher-student relations" but cries out from its every pore: "THOU SHALT NOT LOVE." ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.40 ------------------------------------ The Later Career of John Francis Bloxam J.Z. EGLINTON, New York ABSTRACT: The author of "The Priest and the Acolyte" grew up to be himself a much-beloved priest in the Church of England, exerting a beneficial influence on boys with whom he came into contact. Biographical information hitherto unknown is provided. Bloxam is a name known to most readers only as the author of "The Priest and the Acolyte," the story long attributed to Oscar Wilde, and figuring disastrously at the Wilde trials. Wilde was quoted as having said that the story was "worse than that: it is badly written" in reply to a prosecution question on whether he regarded it as blasphemous. Bloxam was editor of The Chameleon, Oxford undergraduate publication published by the then British equivalent of the Government Printing Office, December 1894, and in this ill-fated magazine was not only his own story but Wilde's collection of scandalous epigrams and Lord Alfred Douglas's equally scandalous poems "Two Loves" and "In Praise of Shame." These also were held in evidence against Wilde at the trials. Bloxam escaped unscathed, not even being called as a witness at the trial; possibly the prosecution found no reason to prefer charges even of blasphemy despite the questioning. A British reader of Greek Love, who wishes to remain anonymous, encountered the name of Bloxam in Chapter XV, and promptly sent along the quotation from Crockford's Clerical Directory for 1927, reproduced below. He also furnished, from old friends of his who had known Father Bloxam, details not earlier known to me, which are of value to readers interested in the Calamites. John Francis Bloxam was graduated from Exeter College in 1895, only a few weeks after Wilde's third trial ended so disastrously. He went on to Ely Theological College, taking orders in 1897-8 in the Church of England, and going back to Exeter College for his master's degree in 1901. His later career consisted of a succession of curateships in London. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.41 ------------------------------------ The Later Career of John Francis Bloxam 41 except for a brief service in the British armed forces during World War 1. Crockford's, a standard register of British clergy, listed Bloxam as follows in its 1927 edition: BLOXAM, John Francis: Exeter College, Oxford, B.A. 1895, M.A. 1901. Ely Theological College, 1896. Deacon 1897 by Bishop of Southwark: Priest 1898 by Bishop of Rochester. Assistant Curate at St. Agnes, Kennington Park 1897-1902; St. Andrew, Worthing 1902-1904; St. Cyprian, Marylebone 1904-1905; St. Paul, Knightsbridge with St. Mary, Graham Street 1909-1917; Temporary Chaplain to the Forces 1917-1919 (M.C., 1917 and Bar, 1918); returned to St. Mary, Graham Street until 1922. Vicar of ST. SAVIOUR, HOXTON, diocese of London from 1922. Address: St. Saviour's Presbytery, Northport Street, Hoxton, London, N.1. This laconic account conceals a great deal more than it reveals. My informant, some of whose old friends knew Father Bloxam personally, has been able to fill in the details. There is, first of all, no doubt whatever that it is the same John Francis Bloxam who edited the Chameleon and who went on to the abovementioned career in the C.E. clergy. Bloxam, at the time of editing the Chameleon, was at Exeter College, and I was able to learn from quite independent sources that he graduated in 1895; there was only one John Francis Bloxam graduating B.A. from Exeter College in that year. During Father Bloxam's chaplaincy in the British forces in the war, he contracted some severe throat ailment which plagued him until the end of his life. It caused voice failure during preaching and doubtless con tributed to his final illness; medical specialists could do nothing, and Father Bloxam died on Good Friday, April 6, 1928, "to the great sorrow of everyone who knew him." Shy and reticent, he was well loved in his various parishes, and his friends have described him as a remarkable influence on any boy with whom he came into contact. Being wealthy, Father Bloxam put many of them on the road to good careers. The quotation from Magnus Hirschfeld in note 14 to Greek Love (q.v.) seems appropriate in connection with him, and one may well smile in recollection that the young man who in college wrote "The Priest and the Acolyte" grew up to be a priest who cared enough about boys to help many of them in London's more impoverished post-war days, both in rich and poor parishes. What feats of heroism won him his Military Cross and Bar we have not yet found out. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.42 ------------------------------------ 42 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE Father Bloxam, it seems, became famous throughout the Church of England for many years for reasons not in the least connected with the Chameleon. In 1922 he was called on to succeed his friend Rev. E.E. Kilburn, on the latter's resignation and entry into the Roman Catholic church. He promptly left his curateship at St. Mary's, in the wealthiest quarter of London, for the vicarate at St. Saviour's, in the desolate slum of Hoxton, staying there until August 1927, resigning from ill health ten months before his death. In transferring from St. Mary's to St. Saviour's, he entered the limelight. St. Saviour's church was in the public eye then, and had been so since shortly after the outbreak of World War I, because Father Kilburn, Bloxam's predecessor, had begun holding services in Latin and in texts increasingly close to those used by the Roman church. As a result, the Bishop of London placed it under quiet ban early in 1916 -- despite its having by then an enormous attendance, attracting people from far beyond the parochial boundaries. A vast outdoor procession of the Blessed Sacrament at Corpus Christi, 1917, received tremendous publicity, whereupon the Bishop of London made his ban public, and the newspapers ran many columns over the ensuing disputes. Undeterred, the clergy at St. Saviour's introduced more and more strictly Roman services -- Vespers and others in addition to a Roman-style Mass -- in Latin. In 1921, the squabble went as far as Parliament, and some letters between the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, and the Bishop of London were published in newspapers. At this juncture Father Kilburn retired, being succeeded at his own request by Father Bloxam, who maintained the status quo more or less during his own tenure. My informant mentions that Father Bloxam was quite an artist, beautifying the church in its internal decorations, and taking immense pains to insure that the services were all performed with the utmost precision and beauty. St. Saviour's was, from then until its destruction (in the great night air raid of 15-16 October 1940), the central church of the Anglo- Catholic Movement in Britain, latterly largely because of the pro-Roman Confraternity of Unity being brought from New York's Church of St. Mary the Virgin to St. Saviour's. The Anglo-Catholic movement has made headlines even in the United States. The connection of one of the more pivotal Calamites with it comes as a surprise, especially since most of the members of this clique managed to live and die inconspicuously. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.43 ------------------------------------ VARIA Vicissitudes of Eglinton's "Greek Love." Just for a lark, the Oliver Layton Press sent copies to the appropriate officials in Eire, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia, asking whether the book could legally be imported into each country. The decision of the first three was no. Australia prohibited importation for general use, but allowed "research scholars and members of professions" to bring copies in when they are "able to provide proof of a bona fide need for the publication," and only if the Minister for Customs and Excise receives "a report in support of the application, from the Director-General of Health or the Chairman of the Literature Censorship Board." On a pleasanter note, we sent a copy of the book to the National Library of Greece, and got back a nice letter thanking us "warmly for the donation of your wonderful book which you were so kind to send us." Perhaps the glorious spirit that was Greece is not completely dead. The book was accepted for publication by an English firm over a year ago, but now they are having second thoughts; they have been told that they will be prosecuted if they publish, the penalty being a jail term and a heavy fine. Kala-Verlag of Hamburg is bringing out a German edition, which will probably be ready in early 1967; they apparently do not anticipate legal problems. The Swiss publication Der Kreis/ Le Cercle has refused to review Greek Love at all and has returned the review copy, without giving any reason for this action. Here is a clipping from the New York Times which is enough to make one weep: L.I. TEACHER SOUGHT IN MOLESTING CASE KINGS PARK, L.I., May 18, 1966. -- A highly esteemed schoolteacher, active in the Little League and the Parent-Teacher Association, was being sought today for having allegedly molested a dozen school-boys in the last three years. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.44 ------------------------------------ 44 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE The Suffolk County Police issued a 48-state alarm for the teacher, Frederick F. Young, a slight 38-year-old bachelor who has taught the fifth grade in this suburban hamlet for eight years. The police said Mr. Young had allegedly molested the boys in the Indian Head Elementary School and on fishing trips and overnight outings that he organized. The charges were based on statements made to the police by a dozen boys, from 10 to 13 years old. Mr. Young learned that he was being sought last night, the police said, from an angry mother who told him the police would get him. He was believed to be headed for his vacation home in Fort Lauderdale. Fla. School officials suspended him this morning. According to the police, Mr. Young never threatened the boys with physical harm. Readers of Plato's Apology will remember that when Socrates was asked to propose a penalty for his "crimes," he suggested that he be maintained at the prytaneum at public expense -- an honor granted to distinguished people whom Athens wished to reward. The Times clipping reveals a similar situation: a highly-esteemed teacher is being accused of corrupting youth. We think Mr. Young should be "punished" in the same way, perhaps with a gold medal in recognition of his meritorious services to boys, presented by Pres. Johnson at the White House. Medallic Memorial of Boy-Love. There is a silver medallion portraying Pope Paul III Farnese, on the jubilee of his cardinalate, and having for reverse device a nude Ganymede. The piece is an excellent example of Renaissance bas-relief work, by the sculptor Cesati. 'Of this particular pope even the Encyclopaedia Britannica speaks disparagingly, citing his "lax personal morality" -- which presumably means that he enjoyed mistresses or minions or both, as usual at the time (ca. 1549). In a future issue of the Journal we hope to feature an illustration of this medallion together with a biographical sketch of pope and sculptor. Quoted Without Comment: General Dwight D. Eisenhower -- like many of the American soldiers he commanded during World War II -- had a practice of handing out chewing gum to local children in this and that European locale. At a home for orphan boys outside London, near where Eisenhower was planning the invasion of Europe, Eisenhower one day stopped ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.45 ------------------------------------ Varia 45 to greet the youngsters and as usual handed out gum. "That night the home's superintendent caught him [Leslie Thomas, then an inmate of this orphanage] unwrapping a stick of gum and sent him to bed with the announcement that his weekly allowance -- about 5 cents -- would be withheld that week. The superintendent told him: 'I won't have you talking to men -- and especially Americans!"' [New York Times, May 8, 1964, quoting from Leslie Thomas' autobiography, This Time Next Week.] "What a bore one's own native civilization is. . . . I had the good fortune to be educated in Greek and Latin. This education served me as a magic carpet on which I wafted myself from the 20th century of the Christian era to the third century B.C., and from the North Atlantic to the Eastern Mediterranean. . . . My inescapable Westernness makes it impossible for me to become culturally acclimatized in any of these other contemporary civilizations. . . . However, I have a more formidable reason for disliking the West than any that I have mentioned so far. Since I have been grown-up (I am now turned 75), the West has produced two world wars . . . Apart from contemporary Western crimes, there are other blemishes on contemporary Western life that I find repulsive. Though I dislike the former enslavement of the individual to the community in Japan, I also dislike, and this perhaps even more, the lengths to which contemporary Western individualism has gone. . . . Looking back into the past history of the West -- a past which was still present when I was a child -- I admire the 19th century West's success in postponing the age of sexual awakening, sexual experience and sexual infatuation far beyond the age of physical puberty. You may tell me that this was against nature; but to be human consists precisely in transcending nature -- in overcoming the biological limitations that we have inherited from our prehuman ancestors. . . . Sex is a still more awkward feature of our biological inheritance than death, and 19th-century Western society handled sex with relative success. By postponing the age of sexual awakening, it prolonged the length of the period of education. . . . Nineteenth-century Westerners . . . deplored, also with justice, the spectacle of an intellectually promising Moslem boy being allowed to commit intellectual suicide by sexual indulgence at the age of puberty. The 20th-century West is now imitating the non-Western habits that the 19th-century West rightly -- though perhaps self-righteously -- condemned. . . . We are proud of ourselves for providing ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.46 ------------------------------------ 46 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE secondary education, college education, postgraduate education for everybody. But we shall be plowing the sands if we do not simultaneously revert to our grandparents' practice of prolonging the age of sexual innocence." [Arnold J. Toynbee, "Why I Dislike Western Civilization," in New York Times Magazine, May 10, 1964. One may recall that Toynbee was a product of the British public school system, and question the accuracy of his observations and of his evaluations.] ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.47 ------------------------------------ LETTERS [The earlier ones are commenting on Greek Love rather than on the first issue of this Journal. Ed.] Editor, IJGL: I just read your book Greek Love and want to express my admiration for the very fine job you have done with this topic. As you undoubtedly know there is too much cheap and irresponsible literature on the topic of homosexuality and I feel that your book is a scholarly contribution to a most important aspect of contemporary homosexuality. DR. HENDRIK M. RuITENBEEK New York City [Dr. Ruitenbeek is editor of The Problem of Homosexuality in Modern Society, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1963.] Editor, IJGL: You say Andre Gide [p.284, Greek Love] is primarily defending androphilia in Corydon. I am not sure of this. I think it is quite clear that he believes Greek love relationships are good for boys, at the end of his fourth dialogue. No one will doubt, however, that Gide's own life has done the cultural attitude to Greek love more harm than good. You assume that a predominantly homosexual individual is so unable to understand the psychology and social norms of the heterosexual "National Game" that he will not be able to communicate them to his boyfriend. We really do not know the effect of exclusively homosexual paidophiles on their boyfriends; studies of this problem are apparently nonexistent. Does the homosexual developmental stage exist in sexually permissive societies? An answer to this question would provide needed evidence for or against the notion that such stages have not been "lived through," or are "unfinished business," in adult homosexuals. Surely, the advertisements depicting teenagers in bloom are not aimed at paidophiles so much as at parents who might be convinced that their own sons, wearing these articles of clothing, will look just as good as the models. Were your idea correct, we ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.48 ------------------------------------ 48 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE might find more TV programs or advertisements featuring such boys. There are, in fact, quite a number -- I count three commercials and seven or eight programs recently seen in my own area, five of these programs being regular network presentations -- but not nearly as many as your theory would lead one to believe. Perhaps the physique photo business is a more reliable indicator, and here one must admit that the number of teenagers depicted has increased greatly in the last few years. I have received a letter from one American physique photographer admitting to deliberately understating his models' age by two years, whenever he thinks he can get by with the deception. He finds that his customers largely tend to order photos of his youngest-looking models. One may well also wonder about the incidence of homosexuality among the models themselves, about whether this is variable with age, about whether the younger ones know what types of people are the major customers for such magazines, and about whether many of the models themselves are not hustlers. Too great reliance on the first Kinsey report [1948] is not safe. Dr. Paul Gebhard has admitted that the sample used for this publication contained a disproportionately high number of persons with prison experience in the grade-school-only part, and to a lesser degree only in the high-school-only part. The forthcoming study will show that those individuals who have had a prison experience by the time of interview have sexual histories quite different from the rest of the population. The Institute's criteria for class also depend more on education than on socioeconomic status. D.W. NICHOLS Mason, Michigan [The data on preliterate permissive societies available to me seem to indicate that homosexual behavior is found with variable frequency in them, but not necessarily as a stereotyped developmental stage which an adult has failed to live through. I have not seen enough evidence to enable watertight conclusions. Ford and Beach cite analogues of Greek love in the Siwans of Africa and the Keraki of New Guinea, among other permissive societies. Plains Indian tribes often include a social role for the transvestite or highly gynandroid type involving the performance of domestic activities ordinarily assigned to women; and occasionally these activities can include affairs or even a quasi marriage to a man who may have a wife of his own. Similar patterns have been described for various Australian aborigines, South American Indians, and Mongolian tribes in central and eastern Asia. The appearance of such patterns does not seem to vary greatly with the amount of permissiveness, ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.49 ------------------------------------ Letters 49 though the frequency in a given culture may so vary. Anthropologists reading this are welcome to comment from their own experience or more exact data. [Part of the difficulty has been that anthropologists so far have not fully understood that agemate-oriented adolescent homosexual feelings, androphilia in males, and Greek love analogues, are psychologically different patterns. We may have to go back to the original notebooks of field researchers and reanalyze the data on the basis of these distinctions before an answer to this very significant question becomes possible. [The criteria for class in sociology have long been a matter of dispute, as comparison of those used by the Lynds, Lloyd Warner, the Gluecks, etc., will immediately disclose. However, your argument against Kinsey I, though valid, has been less used as a basis for criticizing the Kinsey methodology than many others. My own reliance on Kinsey I has been very slight and confined almost entirely to that mentioned in note 35 to Greek Love, 451. JZE] Editor, IJGL: On examining the tables in Hirschfeld's magnum opus [Die Homosexualitat des Mannes und des Weibes, 1914] listing the provisions of the penal codes of the world as of 1913, I was surprised to note that the age of consent, in countries having no law against homosexuality as such, varied from 12 to 16, with the sole exception of the Netherlands, where in 1911 a government dominated by the clerical parties had raised it to 21. The higher ages of consent -- 17 to 21 -- were therefore introduced only later, and have no traditional basis whatever. It would seem that the more recent statutes were inspired by a misguided neo-liberalism that considered it necessary to "protect" adolescents from sexual experience. Moreover, I now incline to think that the legislators -- and the other persons who advocate severe penalties for adults who have intercourse with minors -- may simply be rationalizing a cultural taboo against sexual contact between individuals of widely differing ages. Even the psychoanalysts have succumbed to this, by equating the violation of culturally-prescribed inhibitions with behavior stemming from psychopathology. In the Orient, marriage between a middle-aged man and a girl of 12 or 13 has always been legally and socially sanctioned, and homosexual relations have normally been between an adult male and a boy in early adolescence. Consequently, we should not look to Judaism or early Christianity for the source of this taboo, but may have to seek it in Germanic folk custom and traditional law, like ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.50 ------------------------------------ 50 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE the taboo on polygamy, which is unknown to Eastern Mediterranean culture but became established in Christian dogma after the conversion of the Germanic tribes. DR. WARREN JOHANSSON [One may ask if the sanction of marriage between a middle-aged man and a girl of 12 or 13 in the Orient was not ultimately derivable from the sanction of child marriages, i.e. for dynastic or other socio-economic purposes, in societies where not the nuclear family but the clan was the norm, and where a marriage was a means of uniting two families. One may also ask about the capacity of a barely puberal girl to give consent to marriage. Marriage is a far more serious affair than is a nonmarital sexual affair, whether heterosexual or homosexual, if only for the socio-economic consequences following on pregnancy.) Editor, IJGL: While I do think your whole thesis is utterly absurd, both from the point of view of its concept and from that of its "uplift" angle, I did greatly enjoy reading your book, especially Part Two, from the literary and historical angle. Regarding the spurious uplift angle, I could add nothing to what your Critic and A. Ellis have said. As for the concept, I'm sure you yourself know perfectly well how nonsensical it is to characterize the average Kinsey Six as essentially androphilic, One and Mattachine Review to the contrary notwithstanding. Statistically, I think it would be incontrovertible that not less than 75% and maybe as many as 90% have as their real sexual ideal some type of some age within your own pre-empted Greek love bracket of 13-21. Mock androphilia is no more or no less valid than mock heterosexuality as the usual-as-the-years-advance pis aller bread when the iced cake is not available, or proves too indigestible and/or troublesome when it is, leading inevitably to the "one must build on something more solid than sexual attraction" conclusion or rationalization. But there really isn't one iota of significant distinction between the erotic passions, designs, and techniques of your Kinsey Three Greek lover, with or without the spurious character building motif, and the Kinsey Six in pursuit of the identical object. As you will have noted if you have read my book Jonathan to Gide, or have had it called to your attention, there is a surprisingly large amount of overlapping personalities and of quoted passages, such as, in the case of Rochester, our picking exactly the same things for both poems and drama. I was also pleased to note some further backing for some of my more eyebrow-raising names, such as ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.51 ------------------------------------ Letters 51 Goethe. Readers may have noted also a rather surprising identity of attitudes expressed towards historical subjects and periods in our respective books. NOEL I. GARDE New York City [Evidently Mr. Garde and I have encountered different segments of the homosexual population over the years, and I would appreciate something from him for this Journal on his own acquaintanceship -- as likewise from others who can confirm or modify his claims on the basis of sufficiently wide experience with the homosexual subculture. I based my own evaluation of androphilic types on several hundred members of gay communities in over a dozen cities on both coasts and the midwest, 1950-1964. They included many common and readily identifiable categories, among others (1) bar-hopping gentlemen of fastidious dress who welcome one-night stands, frequently with each other, or with sailors or "rough trade," and who all too often shy away from more prolonged relationships; (2) the kinds frequenting "meat racks" and the better known resort beaches from Cape Cod to southern Florida and California -- overlapping with (1) ; (3) a number of professional female impersonators and other actors; (4) a few male prostitutes; (5) a rather larger number of people who have made the homosexual Cause a substitute for religion, rather in the manner of professional Minority Apologists; (6) several discreet pairs who have managed to stay together from one to 25 years, and who are pointed to with pride by some of the less stable gentry; etc. All too often these people seem to be not so much functioning on both sides of their nature as trying to make the best of a bad situation, namely inability to respond meaningfully to the opposite sex. Discreet inquiries, prolonged acquaintance, and depth interviews failed to disclose any such overwhelming preponderance of interest in boys as such on the part of most of them. Many, indeed, are preoccupied with extreme mesomorphy as in professional or near-professional athletes, muscle-builders, etc. A great many seek not someone to protect and bring up, but some Prince Charming type who will sweep them off their feet and satisfy their own passive-dependent needs. The teacher-eros (as Paul Goodman calls it) characteristic of Greek love is rarely found at all. [For that matter, many of the exclusive or nearly exclusive homosexuals who go after teenagers are often content with one-night stands with male prostitutes; and they are looking less for boys than for handsome young men. Cf. A. J. Reiss, Jr., "The Social Integration of Queers and Peers," Social Problems 9(2):102-120 (1962). [Paiderastic types and Greek lovers, on the other hand, to judge from ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.52 ------------------------------------ 52 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE the responses to my book as well as from the interviews constituting field research for it, are obsessed with boyishness per se. The claim that most homosexuals have this obsession does not seem to be borne out anywhere in the literature, so far, and it is surprising to find it coming alike from Garde and from reactionaries such as Viscount Hailsham. Psychiatrists reading this issue are requested to supply data from their own practice which might throw additional light on the question. [I doubt that many individuals described in the case histories in Chs. VII and VIII of Greek Love -- or the dozens of others known to me who could have there been described -- would agree that their own experiences or feelings match Mr. Garde's cynical evaluation. False sentimentality does not exclude the possibility of genuine sentiment. [I am glad to find independent confirmation of some of my own historical judgments in Part Two. My book was being mailed out before Jonathan to Gide -- reviewed elsewhere herein -- appeared. JZE] Editor, IJGL: An era worth exploring as much as Shakespeare's England is Turkey under the Sultans. Much of the anti-Turk European literature reports "atrocities" committed by Turks on European boys, especially (for instance) "tribute children" which Balkan villages had to turn over to the Turks; no doubt some of these stories are true, and no doubt occasional brutalities did occur. But a study needs to be written from the Turkish side. Why were the sodomized page-boys so devoted to their masters? Perhaps a clue can be found in Panait Istrati's Kyra Kyralina, a novel in which a kidnapped Roumanian boy tells of his sex life under a Turkish captor during his early teens. A similar study should be written on love affairs of boys in reformatories and "training" schools. So much of the literature, written by the prejudiced for sensational purposes, reports such experience as uniformly brutal and sordid, where at least occasionally the love of older for younger in distress can be protective, redemptive and rich. The role of young "clerks" who went to colonial Brazil from Portugal before Brazil broke away in 1822, commonly becoming the favourites of merchants, deserves study. This is one area I have never seen discussed even in those European magazines which used to give reports on Morocco, Greece, Spain, Cairo, the oasis of Siwa, Bombay brothels, etc. What I appreciate most about Greek Love is its clear distinction between this phenomenon and ordinary homosexual manifestations. I tend to agree with an article I read ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.53 ------------------------------------ Letters 53 by a Dr. Bradbury in Homophile Studies suggesting the thesis that the homosexual loves a man, while the Greek lover is at least bisexual, often loving the transitory feminine component in the boy. Compare Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, that sturdy lover of women, whose new biography points out that he was not one to pass up the experience with boys which was "typical of the bisexual era of the Ottoman Empire." And isn't it Mary McCarthy in The Stones of Florence who says that Greek love is common in aggressive, virile societies -- in commenting on the affairs of great Renaissance figures with boys? And would not a similar comment apply to our own society now? I suggest that there would be an earth-shaking scandal in the Western world, if a list could be published of the Western Hemisphere notables in politics, entertainment, and business who, in the summer of 1964, took a young boy to a certain camp in Canada, or who took one to a certain resort hotel in Puerto Rico, or Mexico, etc.; not to mention those who have made special trips alone to Hong Kong, Bombay, Istanbul, Greece, Sicily, Tangier, the turkish baths in Mexico City, Spain, Lisbon, and other places. Too bad they aren't free to subcribe. <sic> JONATHAN DRAKE Beirut, Lebanon Editor, IJGL: Most readers are probably agreed that boy-love is, on the whole, a good thing, and ideally should be encouraged in our society. There may not be consensus, however, on the course of action to be taken by socially conscious boy-lovers. The militant ones think 'that the time for this idea has come, just as with so many hitherto unpopular ideas (e.g., Negro rights), and so all the methods of dissenting political groups -- an official organization holding regular meetings, letter-writing campaigns, picketing -- should be employed immediately. The more conservative feel it is more prudent to hold on to what we have. Publicity at this stage, they say, would cause great suffering -- teachers could be fired and disgraced, boys could be adjudged delinquent and packed off to reform schools, etc. According to this view, we must lie low and wait for the taboos to relax of themselves. This difference of opinion between radical and conservative is the same that prevails with respect to any political program. Some feel that the gains made by Negroes are simply not worth the riots, beatings, and murders; some believe that these wrongs are but a small price to pay for the greater good of full political equality. (By the way, let us not laugh at the possibility of a boy-love movement. The nature of American society at present is such that it is easy for a ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.54 ------------------------------------ 54 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE few people who espouse an unusual idea to get plenty of publicity. Rockwell's Nazis never number more than about a dozen, yet large amounts of space in the newspapers and time on the airwaves have been, in effect, donated to them free of charge.) I would like to know what the readers of this Journal think, and I would be pleased if they would write in. ROBERT BASHLOW New York City [The Editor does not subscribe to the view that this Journal can become a political focal point. Its aim continues to be scholarly.] Editor, IJGL: I have read with much interest the first issue of your Journal. I must tell you that I have been rather surprised -- unpleasantly so -- in reading therein the article on Ralph Chubb. This is a translation of an article published under another name in our magazine Arcadie 111 (March 1963). As the article had been first published by us, it was a matter of copyright for your Journal not to translate it without our authorization: at least the original printing should have been quoted. I wonder whether you are in touch with two important European specialists in Greek love, Dr. Mariotti, of Naples, and Dr. O. Brunoz, of the Netherlands? Both have written books on the subject, respectively La Neofilia and La Pedophilie. The 135 issues of Arcadie contain a great many articles of interest for you -- perhaps of greater interest, if I may say so, than the outdated and pedantic article on Albania which you translated from the 1908 Jahrbuch f. sex. Zwischenstufen! MARC DANIEL Assistant Editor, ARCADIE Paris [The significance of the article on Albania lies in its demonstrating that boy-love is not a phenomenon of urban decadence or effeminacy, but that it can and did flourish in a culture similar to that of the heroic age of Greece. [We have not subscribed to Arcadie for many years, and therefore were altogether unaware of prior publication of the Drummond article on Ralph Nicholas Chubb. We apologize for any trouble that this may have caused you and have already contacted the author of the piece. His reply follows this note. [The work of Drs. Mariotti and Brunoz, among others, is known to us and a translation of the latter is now being readied for publication by Oliver Layton Press. [Should any material from Arcadie or other European publications come to our attention as relevant to the ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.55 ------------------------------------ Letters 55 theme of this Journal, we shall respectfully seek permission to issue translations. JZE] The Editor, ARCADIE Dear Sir: With reference to your remarks in Arcadie, No. 139-140, concerning my article "Ralph Nicholas Chubb," an apology is indeed due from me for a seeming discourtesy in allowing a similar article to appear in an English translation in IJGL under the name of Oliver Drummond. It was entirely my oversight that I failed to inform the editor of IJGL of the previous appearance of the article in a French version in your columns in March, 1963. In offering my apologies for an apparent, but quite unintentional, piracy, may I also state that it is I alone who am responsible for the error and the occurrence is in no way to be interpreted as a possible slight on the publishing habits of this new and excellent journnal<sic>. May I also point out that, in IJGL, my article was somewhat revised and includes illustrations and a checklist, neither of which occurs in the Arcadie version. The use of a pseudonym in an English-speaking magazine seemed to me necessary and was certainly not intended to disguise the article as a new piece of work. Yours faithfully S. London, England [The author of that article sent me, in addition to a copy of the foregoing letter, an explanation, fully accounting for his use of a pseudonym. The sister of Ralph Chubb is still alive and retains the copyrights on his works. It would cause her considerable embarrassment were the author's actual name to be connected with this article in a publication which might conceivably get into her hands through accident or malicious interference. She would be perhaps less likely to see a French-language periodical and for that reason the author used his real name in signing the article there. There had at no time been any attempt at deception of readers.] Editor, IJGL: Let me begin by telling you how happy I am to find a movement of this type starting at last. I say "movement" because you, sir, are undoubtedly the precursor of the many articles, essays, and books dealing with Greek love which are sure to follow in the very near future. I was disappointed to find the first issue of IJGL as dry and academic as it was. You did little in extolling the physical beauty of boys, and virtually nothing to justify the definition on the cover. As the only printed voice of this movement, your publication should serve as a primer of both aspects. (I have not as yet read Greek Love: perhaps there is the primer.) I ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.56 ------------------------------------ 56 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE was also quite disappointed to find that you apparently limit the Greek love experience to adolescents. Surely you cannot be blind to the sometimes overwhelming beauty of lads between six and twelve. In the past I have written letters to various groups and organizations in defense of boy-love. Since I am sure of your opinion on the subject, such a defense here would be pointless. Yet I do have a point to make which I feel is relevant to the whole problem. In my own experience, individuals I have met who loved children were, without exception, of better than average intelligence with a higher development of aesthetic sensitivity. This is not to deny the existence of child molesters -- sick people in need of professional attention. The distinction must be made: there is a vast and unrecognized (but not unrecognizable) difference between a sick aggressive individual and one who sees in young boys an ineffable beauty at once humbling and soul-stirring, a beauty which women try so hard to emulate, a beauty which can transfix a man where he stands, a beauty which will bring any real aesthete to tears. There is no reason why a relationship between a man and a boy must necessarily "defile" the boy. A relationship in which the boy is not abused as a sexual outlet but is truly and warmly loved can certainly exist as a benefit to both; here, warmth and tenderness and love replace lust. Where sexual intimacies occur, they are a passionate expression of admiration and affection in the boy as well as in the man. R. AUBREY New York City [My own position, as Mr. Aubrey might have gleaned from Greek Love, is that in general a preadolescent boy is hardly capable of a genuine response of love in the manner in which an older boy responds. One can love a small child -- but it is futile to expect the love to take the Greek form, and the dangers to both parties consequent to sexual experimentation are far greater. I shall regret it greatly if anyone uses my book as a rationalization for forcibly or coercively initiating the ignorant and unripe. JZE] ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.57 ------------------------------------ Recent Books Jean Marcade. ROMA AMOR. Geneva: Nagel Publishers, 1961. Distributed in the U.S.A. by Lyle Stuart, New York. Uniform with EROS KALOS. An earlier and less successful attempt to integrate a slightly popularized essay by this archaeologist with a set of plates largely depicting Roman and provincial erotica from Pompeii and from the so-called Secret Cabinet of the Naples Museum. Marcade does make the very important and neglected point that much of the graphic and sculptural representation of sexual material in Roman times derives from superstition rather than from even the coarsest taste in bawdy stories. Sex, as a manifestation of the Life Force, was regarded then as now as antipathetic to the so-called evil eye; for which reason superstitious Romans wore and cherished phallic amulets and similar apotropaic objects as a kind of antidote to jettatura. Any traveler in Italy even to the present day can testify to the universal fear of jettatori, i.e. people credited with having the evil eye. The automatic half-concealed gestures made against them or against even the mention of jettatura are plainly phallic, and their significance can be read in some such terms as these: "I am still potent and fertile. The Life Force continues unabated for all your worst!" Phallism is seen, for once correctly, as a cult of rebirth. Despite death, life is ever renewed by the god acting through sex. Fear of death, and a not-too-pleasant afterlife, heightens the frenzy of living. And to this prehistoric superstition is added, on the one hand, a refined Greek sensuality, and on the other, a sadistic element specifically Roman (as detailed early in Chapter XI of Greek Love), making the strange combinations of Roman religion and popular practice, hardly understood from then until now, but first clarified in Marcade's book. As so much invidia, i.e. anti-life black magic, was aimed at weakening enemies by depriving them of potency or fertility, so too its antagonistic magic necessarily had to be phallic. And one could, in Rome, worship Priapus in such manner with boy or girl. We may ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.58 ------------------------------------ 58 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE speculate that in Rome rather than elsewhere arose the perennial preoccupation with proving one's virility; as in Rome these various superstitions seem to have been raised to extraordinary heights, not to be killed despite later Christianity. This brief account necessarily leaves aside Marcade's material on the role of the hieros gamos or sacred consummation found in erotic religion in Rome as well as in Hellas -- as well as on the peculiarly distorted forms taken by various Eastern cults of the Great Goddess and patronized primarily by women and castrati. All this material, formerly relegated to archaeological monographs and sensational exposes, is now put into perspective. Marcade's text is understandable to the untrained reader, fascinating, and likely to give rise to endless speculations on the part of the reader, interested in comparative religion, history, anthropology, other social sciences, or fine arts. A few miscellaneous notes: The connection of sexual frenzy and flagellation was presumably learned by Britons in recent centuries from Roman art and literature (p.122). The Bacchic initiation may have involved a mushroom-induced psychedelic experience (ib.; and cf. the Leary-Alpert elaboration of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Psychedelic Experience). The occult concept of magnetism, referred to by Robert Graves as baraka, i.e. the psychic impression left on something by its owner or user, was known in Roman times, and this derived influence was considered as of great importance (p.22). With such attitudes to sex as secondary to magic, in a world seen as hostile and perpetually subject to occult attacks by witches or other persons possessing hidden powers, where in a moment one's whole development could be brought to nothing without even a word or a touch, it is small wonder indeed that Romans failed to develop anything really analogous to Greek love. For "love casteth out fear"; but then fear also casts out love. Marcade's book, then, is important, not to understanding of Greek love, nor yet to the history of erotica, but primarily to understanding how primitive superstitions contributed to the specifically Roman elements in culture -- elements almost universally misunderstood until now. A major contribution. "Noel I. Garde." JONATHAN TO GIDE. New York: Vantage Press, 1964. A collection of some 300 biographical sketches of people known or reputed to have been homosexually inclined or involved. In many instances the biographical details themselves give no clue to the individual's sexual ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.59 ------------------------------------ Recent Books 59 orientation, and we are left only with footnoted references to all-but-unobtainable books such as Magnus Hirschfeld's never-translated Die Homosexualitat, the Jahrbuch f. sex. Zwischenstufen, "Xavier Mayne's" The Intersexes, etc. (Garde informs me, incidentally, that the Mayne work is available through the 42nd St. branch of the New York Public Library: one need only fill out a slip by author and title, go to the reference desk on the third floor, say "I understand you have this book but it's not in the regular card listings," and wait for results. The others may be a little more difficult to locate.) In some instances Garde's sole sources are questionable: historical novels by authors not known to be as careful in research as Graves are perhaps to be regarded with at least one lifted eyebrow. He cites Albert Ellis's article "Art and Sex" in the Ellis & Abarbanel Encyclopedia of Sexual Behavior as sole source for inclusion of the poet/mystic/artist William Blake in his canon; Legman's Love and Death as sole source for Wild Bill Hickok; and J.V. Nash's pamphlet in the Haldeman-Julius "Little Blue Book" series as sole source for George Washington, Cardinal Newman and Henry Ward Beecher. (Legman's "evidence" appears to have consisted of a report that Wild Bill Hickok enjoyed satiny underdrawers next to his skin -- at least he cites nothing more concrete.) There are a few others whose relevance is questionable. e.g. Napoleon Bonaparte. To his credit, Garde himself admits that some of them are dubious, and the book might well have been improved by omitting them. However, some of his figures most likely to provoke controversy are among the better documented ones, e.g. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, General "Chinese" Gordon, etc. Names such as these point up one other methodological flaw: Garde fails to distinguish between predominantly homosexual figures such as Edward II and Richard Coeur de Lion, people who could take their sex where and how they found it, and people who for comparatively brief periods -- or with only one or two known partners -- enjoyed homosexual relationships in a predominantly heterosexual career, such as Goethe. Nor is the idealized, nonphysically expressed homosexuality distinguished from that of the bedroom and the meat racks. This book is going to be used, I fear, by many homosexual apologists to bolster their perennial claims that "The Great Soandso Was One Of Us." Its better use might be as a sourcebook for historians, writers of historical novels, and other researchers. As such, despite its apocopated apparatus criticus, and its shortage of Oriental figures, it is of considerable value. It may also be of interest for comparison with the table in Greek ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.60 ------------------------------------ 60 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE Love, 347, to a certain limited extent corroborating my own claims (made on quite different grounds) that the vicissitudes of Greek love parallel those of heterosexuality over the centuries, and that androphilia has become increasingly the predominant form of expression of one's homosexual side. I should perhaps explain here that many readers have been misunderstanding me: I have been chronicling this trend, not necessarily deploring it; my strictures on androphile homosexuals are not aimed at their sexual orientation per se but at various mannerisms, pretenses, and hypocrisies characteristic of the cultural group or "Minority" (the term actually in use in some outposts) with which they proudly identify themselves. Recommended. "Dr. O. Brunoz." LA PEDOPHILIE. Preface by "Victor Servatius." French translation of unread Dutch original, PEDOFILIE (published by C.O.C., Box 542, Amsterdam). Enclave, Box 857, Rotterdam, Holland, 1964. No price shown; probably available through one or other of the European homophile organizations. A sociological and polemic study of boy-love, specifically of Greek love, done entirely independently of my own. Neither Dr. Brunoz nor I knew of each other's work. Under the guise of objectivity, giving the very real pros and cons. Dr. Brunoz manages to marshal a number of arguments not dealt with in Greek Love, while anticipating some of my own from different angles. The book does overlap mine in some detail but in a way that can only be called independent confirmation. Its approach is more anecdotal and far more polemical than mine, and more aimed at the general public -- a fact having advantages and disadvantages, in that it might be used as a way of breaking down resistance on the part of unwilling adolescents by essentially exploitive men. But its independent confirmation of many of my own researches is heartening. There are fascinating citations of European material not familiar from any other source. I read it with pleasure. French-speaking readers will undoubtedly do likewise. A translation into English is in preparation, to be published by Oliver Layton Press. Georges St. Martin and Ronald C. Nelson, editors. THE BOY: A PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY. New York: Book Horizons, Inc., 1964. This has been reviewed all over the homophile press for what may well be irrelevant reasons. In expensive art-book format, it is a collection of photographs of boys, from toddlers to late teens but emphasizing early and middle adolescence. If the collec- ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.61 ------------------------------------ Recent Books 61 tion has a theme at all, it is "Boyhood is the same the world over." This immediately invites comparison on the one hand with the famous Family of Man collection and with three smaller collections devoted to childhood: The World is Young, Waagenaar's small paperback Children of the World, and the Hanns Reich Children of Many Lands. The book shows signs of hasty preparation; there are a few duplications of photographs, the color work is in some instances most unflattering and there appears no particular rationale behind the choices of pictures to be reproduced in color. Its theme might have been more successfully demonstrated by including a greater diversity of racial and national origins, by showing boys in more varied seasonal activities, and by having a larger proportion of candids and a smaller number of obviously posed shots of young physique-magazine models. As it is, there are many very fine photographs, from any aesthetic viewpoint, and some that appear to have been included on the basis of what was available to the editors. To boy-lovers this collection, with its strengths and weaknesses, will have much the same interest as would an exhibition of nudes and glamour poses to connoisseurs of feminine beauty. Some of the views are shameless, others are as devoid of sexual content as a painting of Westminster Abbey; and this is as it should be. We understand that the editors are preparing a second such collection; it should be of considerable interest. Kirkwood, Jim. THERE MUST BE A PONY. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960; paperback reprint, Signet, 1962. The adolescent hero-narrator of this well-told novel has obviously been in an intense, idealized though presumably nonsexualized Greek love relationship with a man who died just before the story opens -- a man who had been one of the lovers of the boy's mother, a neurotic Hollywood actress. Here is one adolescent anamnesis without the convoluted selfdoubt of Catcher in the Rye, so long identified with -- or even looked up to! -- by mixed-up boys. If the young narrator had been suffering from anything, it was neglect and inconsistent treatment by his mother; inherent warping does not show at all, and the relationship (though to be sure we do see it only from the boy's side) appears as in this instance constructive and without demonstrable ill effect. Hilarious in places, and extremely moving, though subtle and without overdramatization. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.62 ------------------------------------ <advertisement:> GREEK LOVE by J.Z. EGLINTON In 1764, Cesare Beccaria published the epoch-making treatise Dei delitti e delle pene, which marked the beginning of the movement to reform the medieval penal codes with their savage penalties for sexual offenses. In 1864, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published the first of his pamphlets on androphile homosexuality, calling for the recognition of the legal and social rights of a biological minority of the population which religious intolerance had doomed to outlawry and infamy. In 1914, Magnus Hirschfeld, the greatest authority on homosexuality in the first third of the twentieth century, published Die Homosexualitat des Mannes und des Weibes, in which he argued that attraction to one's own sex was a congenital and unmodifiable anomaly, a "third sex" occurring as a natural variety of the human species. In 1964, as the culmination of two hundred years of inquiry and discussion of one of the most complex subjects that have ever baffled the human mind, J.Z. Eglinton published Greek Love, a work destined to clarify the problems of homosexuality and bisexuality by forthrightly repudiating the tendentious assertions of polemicists and apologists and establishing the true character of homosexual relationships within the framework of an orthopsychology and sociology of sexual behavior. Greek Love -- one of the classic treatises in behavioral science -- belongs in the library of everyone whose research, teaching, medical or social welfare practice brings him into contact with the sexual problems of modern life, and who is seeking guidance in the interpretation and direction of human sexuality in all its manifold aspects. ---------------------------------------------------- Please send me .................... copies of Greek Love @ $12.95. Please enter my subscription to the International Journal of Greek Love @ $6.00 for four issues. Name.......................................................... Address....................................................... City. ........................................................ Remittance must accompany order. OLIVER LAYTON PRESS BOX 150, COOPER STATION NEW YORK, N.Y. 10003 ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.63 ------------------------------------ <advertisement:> Now available from Oliver Layton Press: THE ASBESTOS DIARY by CASIMIR DUKAHZ This astonishing work is the first fiction since the Satyricon to explicitly describe what goes on, amatorily speaking, between a man and his boy-friends: "But why do you call it an asbestos diary?" asks 13-year-old Luc. "Because in it I have written about you and me, among others, and it hasn't gone up in smoke and flames," replies the author, whose polarity in the sexual alphabet is the "I" of boys rather than the "O" of females. Luc is the Number One Boy, but among the other young, handsome males Casimir meets (and takes to bed) are: the youngster who would permit himself to be loved only when he was "asleep"; the lad who wanted to become a mother; the youth who was betrayed by a condom; the kid with the foam-rubber crotch; the circumcised lad who grew a second foreskin; the prostitute boy constructed of plasticene and latex. In the pursuit of these not-too-elusive loves, Casimir suffers blackmail, mayhem, rejection, overcharging, cuckolding, competition, police brutality, and violent opposition from animals, Moms and constituted authority. But he endures all because the reward is great; we leave the hero-villain immersed deep in the love affair of his career. In style, this extraordinary book has been compared by delighted readers and critics to Rabelais, Joyce, Miller, Celine and Durrell. Don't deny, yourself the delight of sharing Casimir's adventures. Use the coupon below. Limited edition. Order now at the low price of $5.95. ---------------------------------------------------- OLIVER LAYTON PRESS BOX 150, COOPER STATION NEW YORK, N.Y. 10003 Please send me ....... copies of The Asbestos Diary @ $5.95. Name........................................................ Address..................................................... City........................................................ Remittance must accompany order. ==================================== Int.J. Greek Love v.1 n.2, p.64 ------------------------------------ 64 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GREEK LOVE <advertisement:> ARCADIE MONTHLY MAGAZINE IN FRENCH Poetry, Literature, History, Philosophy, Religion -- from the Homophile Point of View Regular chronicles on the U.S.A., Great Britain, Italy and other European and non-European countries Subscription rate for the U.S.A.: $10 (first-class mail, plain sealed envelope) ARCADIE 19, rue Beranger Paris 3o, France