Weekly
Standard, June 17, 1996
By
Mary Eberstadt
When
most Americans hear the word "pedophile," they usually think of men
like the self-described "child-molesting demon" Larry Don McQuay, who
was released from a prison in East Texas in April and driven to San Antonio to
begin a closely supervised, but nonetheless semi-free, new life. And when most
Americans think of men like McQuay roaming the streets, they react much as did
the outraged, screaming-in-the-streets, placard-carrying citizens of San
Antonio. About the mildest thing said by one of them was "I sure hope
there will be more indictments" to send McQuay back to jail-this, from the
chairman of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles, under whose auspices McQuay
was released. The local victims-rights groups were less restrained. As the
president of one such group put it, in a straddle between threat and hope,
"In this city, he's not going to be safe"-thus summarizing neatly the
vigilante desire that most parents, when contemplating a figure like McQuay,
would doubtless second.
In
addition to a spate of high-profile cases like McQuay's, the past few years
have also witnessed an ongoing public obsession with child abuse in any form; a
Congress that, at the urging of the White House and Justice Department, has
toughened the penalties for child-pornography trafficking; and Bill Clinton's
signing of the constitutionally complicated Megan's Law, which makes it
impossible for those once convicted of child-sex offenses to move anonymously
into an unsuspecting neighborhood.
And
yet a funny thing happened on the way to today's intense fear and loathing of
Chester the Molester. For even as citizens around the country have sought new
ways of keeping the McQuays of the world cordoned off from the rest of us, and
even as the public rhetoric about protecting America's children has reached
deafening levels, a number of enlightened voices have been raised in defense of
giving pedophilia itself a second look.
After
all-or so some of these voices have suggested-what if pedophilia is in fact a
victimless crime? What if teenagers, and even children, are more in control of
their emotions, their bodies, their sexuality, than the rest of us think? What
if sexual relations with adults are actually "empowering" to the
young? What if pedophiles and would-be pedophiles are in fact victims
themselves-exploited by the cunning young people they befriend?
There
are also the matters of civil liberty. Is it fair to send people to jail for
owning, trading, and obsessively consuming child pornography when no one is
really injured by such practices? And what about the notion of an "age of
consent"-isn't it an anachronism, in this age of adolescent sexual
precocity? Shouldn't it be lowered to a more realistic standard? Say, to
fourteen? Thirteen? Twelve?
Once
upon a time, the reader losing sleep over questions like these would have had
to travel to Times Square, or the local porn shop, or perhaps the nearest
branch of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). But no longer.
Now he need only subscribe to the right stylish magazines, the right
cutting-edge publishers, and be familiar with the work of the right celebrated
authors. It is hard to know what to make of these piecemeal attempts-which
amount to nothing so elevated as a movement-to rewrite what most of the rest of
us persist in thinking about adults whose sexual interests run to kids. Call it
the last gasp of a nihilism that has exhausted itself by chasing down every
other avenue of liberation, only to find one last roadblock still manned by the
bourgeoisie. Call it pedophilia chic.
Calvin
Klein's Leather Daddy
For
laymen, the best-known example of this phenomenon was last summer's
much-reviled and ultimately abandoned ad campaign for Calvin Klein jeans. In
fact, as the record will show, when measured against other recent soundings on
the subject of adult-child sex, that ad campaign itself appears-pun
intended-mere child's play. But first, a review of the facts.
Just
about a year ago, the company launched a series of print and television ads
that were, according to almost every critic who reviewed them, bizarrely and
upsettingly reminiscent of child pornography. Even for a public made blasé by
exposure to Calvin Klein's many other provocative images, the seediness of this
latest effort proved just too much. There were, first, the images themselves:
teenage models-most looking bored, with legs spread apart and underwear
revealed-lounging around semi-dressed. There was also the matter of setting.
The cheap wood paneling and shag carpets were supposed to suggest a suburban
rec room-another visual convention, it seems, of the child-porn genre.
By
common consent, the scripts for the TV ads-which ran only in New York before
being withdrawn-were even more compelling evidence of the campaign's
indebtedness to the pornographic canon. In those ads, an offstage male voice
seemed to goad the young models into responding through a combination of wiles
and special pleading. "You take direction well-do you like to take direction?"
the voice asked a girl. The lines to boys were smuttier still. "You got a
real nice look. How old are you? Are you strong? You think you could rip that
shirt off of you? That's a real nice body. You work out? I can tell." And
so on.
Though
girls and boys alike appeared in the ads, it was clear to any savvy viewer that
the boys, rather than the girls, were the main event. For one thing, there was
nothing really new about the girls. As a critic for Adweek remarked at the
time, "Girls have been objectified forever. It's not shocking, sad to
say." (It is particularly unshocking in a Calvin Klein jeans campaign;
after all, it is now fifteen years since an underage Brooke Shields was used to
suggestive effect.)
No,
what was new in this latest effort was the question of who those boys were
posing for. As James Kaplan noted acidly in New York magazine, "What
especially got to many people was the images of the boys, scrawny and
white-chested, posing like pin-ups, their cK Calvin Klein jeans partially undone.
. . . That was really groundbreaking advertising."
The
talent, too, was cutting edge. The ad campaign was shot by the well-known
photographer Steven Meisel (who is credited, among other work, with the photos
in Madonna's Sex book). Meisel in turn made another personnel choice of
celebrity interest. As the Washington Post reported later in September:
When
President Clinton railed against those notorious Calvin Klein ads . . . he
probably didn't know that the off-camera voice in the television versions belonged
to a gentleman named Lou Maletta-aka the Leather Daddy. Since Calvin Klein
proclaimed loudly in his defense that there was no pornographic intent to the
ads, Maletta was certainly an interesting casting choice. . . .
Maletta,
58, is founder and president of the New York-based Gay Cable Network, which
produces "Gay USA," a news show; "In the Dungeon,"
"about the New York leather scene"; and "Men & Films,"
which features excerpts from gay porn videos, and for which Maletta's Leather
Daddy character was created.
The
next day, the Post was forced to publish a correction: At the last minute, and
for reasons unclear, Klein himself decided to replace "Leather Daddy"
with a professional voice-over actor. Interesting though that decision may
be-at the very least, it does seem to imply an awareness on someone's part that
there was such a thing as going too far-it is not nearly as significant a
choice as that of commissioning Maletta in the first place. What that choice
signified was what any sophisticated viewer would already have discerned-that
the ads had an obvious man-boy sexual subtext.
The
second interesting fact about the outcome of the Klein affair was the
inadvertently revealing rationale put forth by company officials. The main idea
seemed to be that teenagers are more sexually sophisticated than many adults
want to believe. "The message of the cK Calvin Klein jeans current
advertising campaign," as a full-page ad in the New York Times and
elsewhere informed the public, was that "young people today, the most
media savvy generation yet, have a real strength of character and independence.
They have very strongly defined lines of what they will and will not do . .
." It was this very strength, officials reiterated, that proved
discomfiting to the public at large. "The world," as Klein himself
told an interviewer shortly after the ads were pulled, "is seeing a
reflection of what's really going on."
In
a sense, Calvin Klein got it exactly right. All that groundbreaking advertising
was indeed reflecting something real, albeit something very different from what
the ex-post-facto explanations claimed. What those ads did mirror was something
else: the idea that non-adults (particularly if they are boys) are appropriate
sex objects for adults (particularly if they are men).
Contrary
to what some critics implied at the time, Calvin Klein and his team did not
invent the idea of using man-boy sex to grab public attention; they merely
submitted it to a commercial plebiscite. Middle America, to the surprise of the
fashion moguls, voted the campaign down. But Middle America has only been one
testing ground for revisionist suggestions about pedophilia. Other, more
sophisticated venues have proved more willing to give the subject a second
look.
'A
Step in the Right Direction'
Consider
an example from the New York Times, which, in an eerie conjunction, appeared
within weeks of the Calvin Klein ad blitz. At the time, as readers may recall,
the public fear of pedophile predators was being fanned by the discovery of yet
another form of outreach: the home computer. In the preceding months, one
16-year-old boy had run away with bus tickets provided by a chat-line
"friend"; similar cases of solicitation had become the subjects of
FBI investigations; and Congress, heavily pressured by interest groups, had
turned its hand to devising legislation that would prevent the exploitation of
minors via cyberspace. All in all, it seemed an unlikely moment to suggest that
those selfsame chat rooms and bulletin boards had their bright side. But that
is exactly what the Times managed to do in a front-page report by Trip Gabriel
called "Some On-Line Discoveries Give Gay Youths a Path to
Themselves."
Though
"a handful of high-profile cases" had "dramatized the threat of
on-line predators," wrote Gabriel, kids themselves shared no such fears of
the screen. In fact, "all the young users interviewed" for the Times
piece "said the threat was exaggerated, adding that they would not be
likely to meet blindly with an on-line acquaintance." In fact, if the kids
had any fear at all, it seemed to be quite the opposite-that their lines of
communication would be shut down by party-pooping parents and legislators.
Recent legislation, in particular, this reporter discovered, "has made
some gay youths fearful about the future of on-line discussions."
And
fearful they should be, if cyberspace is really the lifeline the Times made it
out to be. A "distraught youth" in California was "on the verge
of suicide" until reaching one "Daniel Cox, 19, a regular on an Internet
chat channel dedicated to gay teenagers" at 3 a.m. Cox ministered to the
California youth, and the next day "the young man was back on line and
doing O.K., Mr. Cox said [emphasis added]." This apparently happens all
the time. As another of these selfless do-gooders put it-one Michael Handler,
"17, a moderator of the Usenet news group for gay youth"-"We
want everybody to be who they are and be happy and not kill themselves because
they feel they're some sort of abomination."
Another
teenager, Ryan Matsuno, "typed out a plaint of loneliness" one night,
only to receive "more than 100 supportive E-mail letters" within the
next few days-letters that "gave me courage" and "the initiative
to go through with telling my mother," according to Master Matsuno. Still
another teenager, we are told, used his computer skills to outwit that rarest
of things in cyberspace, an actual predator: "Dan Martin, a gay
17-year-old in Fresno, Calif., said he talked for a year on line to a man
claiming to be 21. Occasionally the conversation turned to sex. When Mr. Martin
suggested a meeting, the man refused and confirmed Mr. Martin's suspicions that
he was really middle-aged. 'After I confronted him, I never heard from him
again,' Mr. Martin said."
In
sum, according to Gabriel, "sites for gay and lesbian youth are the source
of some of the most stirring stories in cyberspace."
These
touching dramas, the Times report continued, are social-worker
approved-certainly by one Frances Kunreuther, director of "a social
service agency for gay teenagers in Manhattan," who says, "I think
the Internet is a step in the right direction." At the same time, though,
the social workers also "cautioned that cyberspace could not substitute
for face-to-face contacts." But wait: Aren't face-to-face contacts exactly
what most people fear when they think of kids in sex-saturated "chat
rooms"? Well, no matter. And no matter too, apparently, that anyone
logging on as a teenager could be 17, or 70-or 7. The only thing that matters,
or so it appears from reporter Gabriel, is that "the electronic curtain is
not a closet"-this, from one Reid Fishler, founder of an Internet site
called the "Youth Assistance Organization," who is said to be 19.
'A
Danger to His Students, or Only to Himself?'
Another
place willing to ask some hard-nosed questions about grownups who are sexually
interested in kids is Vanity Fair magazine. For the most part, its glossy pages
seem an unlikely territory on which to argue in earnest about anything-much
less about anything as obscure as whether a high school teacher obsessed with
child pornography was in fact a misunderstood victim himself. Nonetheless, it
was in a 1992 issue of Vanity Fair that veteran reporter Jesse Kornbluth
published what is probably the most heartfelt and sympathetic portrayal of a
convicted child-pornography trafficker yet to appear in expensive print.
"Exeter's
Passion Play," as the piece was called, concerned the fate of Larry Lane
(or "Lane") Bateman, a tenured teacher at the elite Phillips Exeter
Academy who was convicted in October 1992 of possessing and transporting child
pornography. The preceding summer, a police raid on his apartment had turned up
33 videotapes of child pornography. The police also found hundreds of
pornographic tapes featuring adults-that is to say, men-and still other tapes
made by Exeter students on assignment from Bateman that their teacher had
spliced and doctored to his liking (for example, zeroing in on genital areas).
Finally, the police also found sophisticated videotaping equipment, some of
which belonged to Exeter, later valued at between $200,000 and $250,000.
As
Bateman would later admit to the authorities, he had been involved with child
pornography for twenty years-buying it, lending it, going out of his way to get
it, and above all, viewing it obsessively. Moreover, at least some of the
people in his life were aware that he was deeply involved in pornography of
some sort; the Vanity Fair piece itself cites at least two. But the question of
who knew what, and when, was mostly irrelevant to Bateman's criminal trial,
which centered on four specific counts relating to child pornography. That case
rested largely on a single witness named Michael Caven (born Michael Pappas), a
one-time student of Bateman's from a high school on Long Island who had now
turned chief accuser and informant.
Bateman
denied Caven's most damning charges-that he had molested Caven from the age of
16, and that he had taken pornographic pictures of him as a legal minor. But
what Bateman could not deny was that in the course of 1990 alone he had sent or
given Caven more than 100 pornographic video tapes, and that at least some of
these tapes were child pornography. Bateman, for his part, never denied having
given Caven child pornography; he only denied having sent those particular
tapes through the mail. ("I'm not totally stupid," he explained at
his trial.)
And
there was more. According to a pre-sentencing memorandum submitted by the U.S.
Attorney's office, boys at Exeter had been filmed in the showers and bedrooms
without their knowledge, thanks to one of Bateman's hidden cameras. "The
boys," the memo noted, "are either wearing undershorts, towels or
nothing." Also in the memo, according to the New York Times, was the fact
that Bateman spliced pieces of the students' tapes into pornographic films.
"Mr. Bateman," the Times reported, "duplicated tapes made by
about 20 students for class onto a master tape, giving each segment a name like
'Blonde Zen Lad' and 'Belt Spanked.'"
Surreptitious
filming of students, pornographic tape-making, pornographic tape-editing,
pornographic tape-swapping with a former student, pornographic reconstruction
of homework videos: Not everyone prizes hobbies like these in a boarding school
teacher, with or without that library of kiddie porn on the side. Certainly
that was the view adopted at last by Exeter itself, which fired Bateman within
24 hours of his arrest. Something of that view seems also to have been shared
by federal district court judge Jose A. Fuste, who in January 1993 sentenced
Bateman to five years in prison without parole for one count of possession and
two counts of interstate shipment of child pornography-a sentence that, though
hardly the maximum allowed by law, was a far cry from leniency. (Under a fourth
count, forfeiture, Bateman was also forced to surrender his video equipment.)
There was also the influential fact that Bateman showed no remorse whatever for
his behavior. As a report in the New York Times put it when the sentence was
announced: "He said he still did not understand what was 'so wrong' about
what he had done. 'If I strangled a child, if somebody had been hurt, if
somebody's property had been destroyed, then there certainly would be a
victim,' Mr. Bateman said. 'Where are the victims?'"
Where,
indeed? It is that question that reporter Jesse Kornbluth sets out to answer,
and the way he answers it will likely take some readers by surprise. For the
chief victim of the Bateman affair, as it turns out, was not, say, Michael
Caven, or the Exeter students filmed in the showers, or even all those little
boys who were somehow made to perform in all those movies with titles like
Ballin' Boys Duo, Young Mouthful, and Now, Boys! No, the chief victim of it
all-perhaps even the only victim, if the story told in Vanity Fair is
correct-appears to have been Bateman himself.
In
the first place, or so at least Kornbluth's essay makes clear, Bateman was a
victim of his accuser, Michael Caven (alias Pappas). Caven, the reporter tells
us, was a hustler, an alcoholic, a druggie. He exploited rich, older men
(including, we are told, Frank Caven, the successful owner of several gay bars
who legally adopted his young sex partner in a moment of drunken inspiration).
In
fact, throughout Kornbluth's essay, not a kind or empathetic word appears for
the man who claimed to have been abused by Bateman as a teenager. But there
are, interestingly enough, many, many words from the Pappas/Caven detractors,
and Caven is described by a former colleague in the bar business as "a
jerk and an egotist. He was media crazy . . . he loved to get his face in any
rag in town." Bateman's friends, he reports, "loathe" Michael
Caven. "If he wanted to do Lane a favor, he could have said, 'Get
help,'" one snaps. "Lane doesn't deserve to have his life
ruined."
Second,
or so it appears on this telling, Bateman was the victim of the
"brutality" and "frosty environment" of Exeter itself.
(This turn looks ironic, for under Kendra O'Donnell, who was appointed
principal in 1987, the school would seem to have entered a progressive warming
phase; it was under O'Donnell, for example, that Exeter-which now boasts a
Gay/Straight Alliance-invited gay alumni to come and speak to the students
about their sexuality.) Surely Bateman's firing was hypocritical; after all, we
are talking about Exonians, who in Kornbluth's telling at least are a
worldly-wise and sexually sophisticated bunch. "The idea that single male
teachers might be homosexual and appreciate young men," he writes of these
preppies, "would not be a soul-shattering revelation to Exeter
students."
And,
of course, the hapless Bateman was also a victim of a society that forces
homosexuals to act furtively. When faced with the conservatism of Exeter, where
"only one instructor has come out," Lane Bateman stayed in the closet.
And it was all that time in the closet, it is argued here, that led to his
taste for child pornography. "'It's not healthy to be so secretive, but
Lane never felt secure enough at Exeter to come out,' explains a friend who has
long known of Bateman's interest in pornography. . . . 'He's heavy into
fantasy. These sex movies are the legacy of the closet.'"
In
case the reader misses the point, Bateman is also provided an opportunity to
expound on it himself.
Bateman
says he purchased the material that ultimately brought him down several years
before he started teaching at Exeter, when he was coming out of the closet and
wanted to make up for lost time. "For a few years, you could buy anything,
and I bought some films and books that featured young boys," he says.
"For me, these pictures were aesthetic, not pornographic. I know people
say, these images are despicable-how can you think that? But the key point is
that I identified with the boys, not the men. If someone young had grabbed me
when I was that age and said, 'Let me teach you something,' I would have said,
'Sure.'"
And
here, as with the example of Calvin Klein, we come to the real heart of
pedophilia chic: It's about boys. It is boys and boys alone who are seen as
fair sexual game. For if Bateman's cache of child pornography had featured
little girls, rather than little boys, it is unthinkable that he would have
become the object of a sympathetic profile in the likes of Vanity Fair. That a
teacher whose sexual tastes run to boys rather than girls could come to command
a cultural dispensation for that preference-this, rather than the "legacy
of the closet," would seem to be the "deeper meaning" of the
scandal at Exeter.
Biased
though it was in favor of Lane Bateman, and much as it seemed to suggest that
child pornography may be a victimless crime, the Vanity Fair piece at least
stopped short of endorsing either child pornography or pedophilia per se. It is
an amazing fact that these omissions would come to seem positively retrograde
in light of an essay appearing two and half years later in yet another stylish,
widely circulated magazine, the New Republic.
A
Good Word for NAMBLA
The
most overt attempt by a hip journal to give pedophiles a place at the table
came in the form of a May 8, 1995, "Washington Diarist" in the New
Republic by Hanna Rosin entitled "Chickenhawk." Ostensibly inspired
by a "riveting" documentary of the same name about the North American
Man-Boy Love Association, "Chickenhawk" opens with the following
quote from the film's star, a real-life pedophile named Leyland Stevenson:
"He's just like a flower in bloom. He's at that perfect stage, in which he
is hermaphroditic. . . . He's in that wonderful limbo between being a child and
an adolescent-he's certainly an adolescent, but he has that weird feminine
grace about him."
Stevenson,
of course, is talking about a little boy. It is a quote intended to jolt the
reader, and no doubt for most readers it still does. Having already invited the
reader to imagine a child as seen through the eyes of a pedophile, Rosin then
proceeds to something more avant-garde still: a chatty review of man-boy love
and of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (whose informal motto, as
some readers may know, is "Eight is too late").
"Chickenhawk,"
the author explains, "is worth seeing" because it "succeeds, at
least partially, in making monsters human." Though it may be true that
Leyland Stevenson is "every mother's worst nightmare," it is also
true-at least true according to Hanna Rosin-that Stevenson and his fellow
NAMBLA members have gotten an unnecessarily bad rap. "There are no steamy
orgies" in the documentary, she notes dryly, "or bound-up boys
languishing in NAMBLA's basement." NAMBLA itself, she casually explains,
"functions mainly as a support group for fantasizers, with the requisite
forums for victim-bonding." Like members of any other group united by
common interests, its rank and file have their humdrum clubby moments; they
hold roundtables (where they "hug and share persecution stories"), solicit
subscriptions, exchange "bulletins." Not only are these activities
benign, it seems, but their propriety is enforced by the club itself.
"Group policy," we are assured, "strictly forbids contact with
live boys or even illicit pictures on the premises."
Next,
Rosin praises NAMBLA's "bravery." "After all," she writes,
"it is still heresy even to consider the possibility of the legitimacy of
their feelings." Today's pedophiles, she reminds us, live in especially
unfriendly times. Politically, things could hardly be worse; witness the tough
language on child pornography in the Contract with America. Even President
Clinton, she notes sarcastically, "was cowed into taking a courageous
stand against 'softness on child pornography.'" Yet NAMBLA, despite it all,
continues pluckily on: "keeping all their activities above
board"-even publishing their New York phone number.
Just
as the grownups of NAMBLA turn out to be more innocent than one might expect,
the boys, for their part, seem to be far more sophisticated. As Rosin reasons,
"it might even be that a budding young stud had the upper hand over the
aging, overweight loner." And how old does a boy have to be, in the Rosin/
NAMBLA view, to qualify for "budding young stud" status? Sixteen? Fourteen?
Twelve? No? Well, how about ten?
One
NAMBLA member in his 20s, an enticing blond with slits for blue eyes, describes
a sexual experience he had with a karate instructor when he was 10. "I
came on to him. I knew what I was doing. I felt very empowered. I felt I controlled
the relationship, which is a good thing for a kid. It dispels the belief that
adults are always in power in such relationships. You know, I led him around. I
was the one in power."
Well,
boys just want to have fun-or, as the New Republic seems to have it, just boys
want to have fun. It is "plausible," Rosin muses, that "a
teenage boy [emphasis added] might agree to sex with an older man."
Similarly, though she notes approvingly that, for example, the age of consent
in the Netherlands is twelve, she nowhere advocates changing the age-of-consent
laws for girls. And she certainly shies away from suggesting that the figure of
the "budding young stud" might be interchangeable with that of a
"budding young slut"-a phrase whose appearance would surely have incurred
the wrath of a good many New Republic readers. "Chickenhawk" itself,
interestingly enough, passed almost without comment from those same
subscribers.
'Kids
Want to Please You'
Actually,
these latest attempts to manage a good word for pedophilia are not quite as au
courant as they first appear. Similar themes have been floated for years by a
number of self-described, self-consciously gay writers-and not only by those on
the cultural fringe, but by several who have crossed over to the mainstream literary
market.
Perhaps
the most prominent of these writers is the acclaimed novelist and essayist
Edmund White. The author of a number of enthusiastically received
novels-Forgetting Elena, A Boy's Own Story, and The Beautiful Room Is
Empty-White has also had a brilliant career as an editor and essayist. He has
worked at Saturday Review and Horizon, been a contributing editor to Vogue and
House and Garden, and written for publications ranging from the New York Times
Magazine to Christopher Street. In 1980, a number of his pieces reflecting on
post-liberation gay life were collected into yet another critically acclaimed
book called States of Desire: Travels in Gay America.
On
account of its historical timing alone-the book amounts to a city-by-city
celebration of gay life published on the very eve of the identification of
AIDS-States of Desire remains a fascinating and retrospectively poignant
sociological document. But it is a work that deserves to be remembered for
something else as well: It is probably the most critically acclaimed piece of
reportage in which the taboo against pedophilia has been examined at
considerable length and judged archaic-a judgment that moreover passed
virtually without comment from White's admiring critics. Throughout most of
this reflection, White studiously keeps to an Olympian "on the one hand
this, on the other hand that" rhetorical monologue-in which one hand, as
in most such monologues, consistently manages to get the better of the other.
Pedophilia,
White asserts at the outset of this discussion, is "the most controversial
issue" in the lives of many in the gay movement. It is also, the reader is
led to understand, a terribly complicated subject. As one gay man-ostensibly
not himself a pedophile-puts it in words that the author quotes approvingly,
"There's no way to answer it [the issue of pedophilia] without exploring
it. We need information and time for deliberation. There are no clear
answers-who would provide them?"
White
is willing to try. "Those who oppose pedophilia," he posits,
"argue that the 'consent' or seeming cooperation of an eight-year-old is
meaningless." On the other hand, "those who defend pedophilia reply
that children are capable, from infancy on, of showing reluctance."
Similarly, "critics of pedophilia contend that children are easily
manipulated by adults-through threats, through actual force, through verbal
coercion, through money." Here again, the other side is allowed the
last-and longest-word:
Champions
of pedophilia (and many other people) argue that children are already exploited
by adults in our society-they are bullied by their parents, kept in financial
and legal subjugation, frequently battered. And they have little legal recourse
in attempting to escape punitive adults. . . . They can't vote, they can't
drink, they can't run away, they can't enter certain movie theaters, they can't
refuse to go to school, they can't disobey curfew laws-and they can't determine
their own sexual needs and preferences. Pedophiles find it ironic that our
society should be so worked up over the issue of sexual exploitation of
children and so unconcerned with all other (and possibly more damaging) forms
of exploitation. If anything, the pedophiles argue, sex may be the one way in
which children can win serious consideration from adults and function with them
on an equal plane; if a child is your lover, you will treat him with respect.
[emphasis added]
And
where does our narrator locate himself between these camps? "I am not in
the business of recommending guidelines for sex with youngsters," he
writes coyly, for "I simply haven't gathered enough information about the
various issues involved." At the same time, though-or so the author
insists-"the question of sex with children remains"; and White makes
a final attempt to get to the bottom of it by interviewing an actual pedophile
in a bar in Boston.
This
man, the author coolly reports, "has a lover of twelve (he met him when
the boy was six)." Far from the voracious predator so feared by the
general public, however, our pedophile could scarcely appear more ethereal. He
is "thirty-six, dressed in faded denims, his face as innocent and mournful
as Petrouchka's. His voice was breathy and light, his manner anxious and almost
humble." Lest there be any last doubt of this man's suitability for polite
company, White erases it with the ultimate compliment. "I was," he
writes candidly, "strongly attracted to him."
There
follows a conversation in which the amorous adventures of White's pedophile are
fondly recounted. White asks how the man met his present "lover," and
the pedophile replies: "At the beach. He was there with his mother. He
came over to me and started talking. You see, the kids must make all the
moves." In case that point has been missed, White reiterates it a few
lines later, this time asking explicitly: "Did your friend take the sexual
initiative with you?" "Absolutely," Petrouchka affirms, adding,
"I've been into kids since I was twenty-two, and in every case the kids
were the aggressors."
What
do you two do in bed?" White next inquires. There follows a graphic
description, which the pedophile concludes on a mournful note. For there is, as
it turns out here, at least one problem with man-boy love that most readers may
not have anticipated: namely, that the kids are too loving. "My last
lover," the pedophile explains, "told me that he didn't like getting
f----d. 'Why didn't you tell me?' I asked. 'Because you liked it so much-I
wanted to please you.' That's the problem; kids want to please you."
A
second writer who has explicitly addressed the matter of men and boys, this
time adolescents, is Larry Kramer, author of the hugely celebrated AIDS play
The Normal Heart and of an earlier novel called Faggots (1978), one of the
classics of the post-liberation gay genre. The comparison between Kramer and
White is particularly useful insofar as the two authors differ markedly in a
number of important ways. Kramer's authorial perspective, as well as his
political persona (he is a well-known activist and co-founder of the New York Gay
Men's Health Crisis), have made him something of an anomaly in his chosen
circles. Between the 1970s and the dawn of AIDS, at a time when most gay
figures were proclaiming the joys of post-Stonewall "liberation,"
Kramer, for his part, was nearly alone in emphasizing its dark side. Faggots,
for example-a controversial book then and now-concerns the plight of a man
looking for homosexual love in the hedonistic heyday of Manhattan and Fire
Island. Kramer includes a number of scenes in which older men drug, flatter,
and seduce teenage boys. Most prominent among these is a 16-year-old named
Timmy, who is initiated into the high life at a party by a series of
experienced men and finally "devoured" by ten at one time. In the
course of this brutal description-one of several in the book involving
adolescent boys-Kramer repeatedly invokes the appeal of Timmy's
"beauty," his "teenage skin," his status as "forbidden
fruit." One by one, the men at the party succumb to Timmy's charms, including
even the most macho of them all ("the Winston Man"), who finds
himself "excited in a way that he has not been since" high school.
Timmy's
fate in the course of the book, it should be added, is not a happy one. Is
Kramer implying that such is the price paid for decadence, or is there tacit
empathy in his depictions of Timmy's many would-be "fathers"? It is
left to the reader to guess. Much less ambiguous, at any rate, is the role
played by Timmy and other "youngsters" in the world that Faggots
portrays.
Another
celebrated gay author who broached the subject of sex with minors is the late
Paul Monette. Monette's 1988 book Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir garnered a
National Book Critics Circle Award nomination and was acclaimed by many as
"one of the most eloquent works to come out of the AIDS epidemic"
(USA Today). His 1992 book Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story won the National
Book Award. It is in this volume that Monette, like Edmund White before him,
puts forth what would once have been a controversial thesis about the sexual
wants of prepubescent boys. "Nine is not too young to feel the tribal
call," he notes early on while recollecting his own childhood adventures
with a boy his age. "Nine and a half is old enough," he repeats
later, adding the by-now familiar note that "for me at least, it was a
victory of innocence over a world of oppression."
Several
chapters later, while reminiscing about an aborted affair he had with a
high-school student while teaching at a boarding school, Monette sounds another
theme that once would have been guaranteed to shock: that of the predatory,
empowered adolescent. "Behind the gritted teeth of passion," writes
the author of his first sexual encounter with a particular boy, "I heard
the ripple of laughter, so one of us must have been having fun. Must've been
Greg, for I was too busy feeding on sin and death to play."
"It
was Greg who always chose the time," he continues, adding dramatically,
"I stood ready to drop whatever I was doing. . . . I lived in thrall to
Greg's unpredictable needs."
That
is not to say that Monette, at the time, felt himself relieved of
responsibility for the affair-far from it. "If I am particular about the
fact of being seduced-putting it all on him, the will and the dare and then the
control-it doesn't mean I didn't feel the guilt. . . . I had become the thing
the heteros secretly believe about everyone gay-a predator, a recruiter, an
indoctrinator of boys into acts of darkness." But this self-recrimination,
he goes on to reveal, was simply false consciousness. For finally, "I
don't think that now. Twenty years of listening to gay men recount their own
adolescent seductions of older guys has put it all in a different light."
Have
all these trial balloons just passed without comment over the public head? One
of the few critics to have taken notice is Bruce Bawer, who in his 1993 book A
Place at the Table castigates Edmund White in particular for his advocacy of
man-boy sex. Such radicalism, Bawer argues, is part of the twisted legacy of
the closet-a legacy that has forced "subculture" writers like White
to ever-more in-your-face positions on account of their oppression by the rest
of society.
But
writers have from time immemorial endured oppression-including jail time and
execution-without leaping to the defense of pedophilia. And what kind of
"oppression" is it, exactly, that confers fame, fortune, critical
raves, national awards, and-in the case of Edmund White-a Guggenheim fellowship
and anointment as a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres?
Pedophile
Science
Actually,
even the likes of White were being more derivative than they would ever like to
believe. Hands down, if you'll pardon the expression, the real big daddy of
pedophilia chic could only be the long-dead Alfred C. Kinsey. As Judith A.
Reisman and Edward W. Eichel point out in their 1990 exposé Kinsey, Sex and
Fraud, "It is Kinsey's work which established the notion of 'normal'
childhood sexual desire"-a notion that, as their book documents, was
field-tested on the bodies of hundreds of children, most of them boys, in ways
that might today be considered imprisonable offenses.
How
did Kinsey and his team get away with it? "As we can see now," wrote
Tom Bethell in his excellent review of the Kinsey facts for the May 1996
American Spectator, "science had vast prestige at the time and Kinsey
exploited it. Any perversion could be concealed beneath the scientist's smock
and the posture of detached observation."
Yet
if Kinsey is now suffering a public disrobing, his intellectual heirs display
their researches still. For a final model of pedophilia chic-this one tricked
out with all the requisite charts, tables, models, and talk of
methodology-consider a volume published in 1993 by Prometheus Books. As its
name seems to suggest, Prometheus is a publishing house of cutting-edge
aspiration, whose backlist reveals its focus on issues like paranormal
psychology, freethinking, and humanism. And, oh yes, a trans-Atlantic
exploration of the virtues of pederasty called Children's Sexual Encounters
with Adults: A Scientific Study, by a trio identified as C.K. Li ("a
clinical psychologist in Paisley, Scotland"), D.J. West ("Emeritus
Professor of Clinical Criminology at Cambridge University"), and T.P.
Woodhouse ("a criminological research worker in Ealing, England").
Like
our other pioneering looks at sex with kiddies, Children's Sexual Encounters
with Adults is sexually biased, concentrating as it does on the "startling
contrast" between boys and girls when it comes to sex with grownups.
("Surveys," as the authors explain at some length, "find that on
the whole boys are less likely than girls to experience bad effects
attributable to sexual incidents with adults.") It is not sexual contacts
per se that pose problems for children, the authors argue, but rather the cultural
prejudices by which most members of society judge such acts. "The damaging
effects on children of intimate but non-penetrative contacts with adults,"
note the authors in a section on "cultural relativity," "are
clearly psychological rather than physical and to a considerable extent
dependent upon how such situations are viewed in the society in which the child
has been brought up."
Again,
and as Hanna Rosin and NAMBLA fans everywhere will appreciate, the study also
emphasizes the positive side of man-boy love for the boy in question. As one
typical paragraph has it:
There
is a considerable amount of evidence that some boys are quite happy in
relationships with adult homosexual men so long as the affair does not come to
light and cause scandal or police action. . . . The great majority [of boys in
a 1987 "study"] came from apparently normal homes, but were pleased
to have additional attention and patronage from a devoted adult and willingly
went along with his sexual requirements.
Parents
everywhere will be relieved to learn that pedophiles themselves are not the
predators of popular imaginings, but congenial well-wishers much like Edmund
White's alluring Petrouchka. "Men who approach boys," the social
scientists write in conclusion, "are generally looking for what amounts to
a love relationship." Thus, "they employ gradual and gentle
persuasion. The average pederast is no more seeking a rape-style confrontation
than is the average heterosexual when looking for a congenial adult partner . .
. "
At
a time when almost every kind of advocacy comes equipped with statistical
batteries, it should come as no surprise that pedophiles and their allies, too,
have acquired their own pseudo-scientific apparatus. Only the unsophisticated
would be surprised to find such a numerological polemic put forward by a
reputable publishing house and advertised in the Barnes and Noble book catalog.
But then, only the unsophisticated stand in need of the reeducation its pages
offer. And there, to return to the figure of Larry Don McQuay, is where the
matter of pedophilia chic would seem to stand. In one corner, enraged parents
from across the country screaming for help in protecting their children; in the
other, desiccated salonistes who have taken to wondering languidly whether a
taste for children's flesh is really so indefensible after all. And they wonder
why there's a culture war.
By
Mary Eberstadt
http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/2623
http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/2619
http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/001/334juixf.asp