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hm, i thought we'd discussed this

Posted by Kristofor on 2012-August-23 13:18:48, Thursday
In reply to I'm afraid I have been coming to that conclusion posted by Shrink Wrap on 2012-August-22 23:31:32, Wednesday


but in case it wasn't clear, I don't formally disapprove of either relationship described in 'How I learned to Snap' by Kirk Read.

As far as sin goes, this is going to bore you, but we need to have a little technical discussion. I'll make it brief. There are sins against commonality - basically, being mean and selfish - and a less serious level of sins against ideality - settling for something significantly less than the best you can do in an area involving love, and doing it in a way that might pre-empt a more ideal approach.

Judaeo-Christianity posits that sex, with its potential for intimacy, is ideally used to build loving relationships. Now, you might not think that casual sex or even anonymous sex prevents this, but in fact, there are ways that it can (if you'll accept a likely accurate observation that doesn't have formal statistics behind it - the purpose of statistics was never to completely deprive all other observational acuity of validity).

In the pre-AIDS gay community where relationship people and multi-partner people used to run about half and half, you could see the latter people getting into a rut where they had great difficulty forming a relationship when they decided they wanted to. They expected that their lover would be a sort of super 'trick,' an especially overwhelming one-night-stand partner. They repeatedly placed their hopes in people who, two weeks or two months later, started to seem extremely boring. Casual sex had built up a whole filtering system in their minds that tended to prevent them making the connections that people make when they form relationships.

Kirk Read mentions ruefully that his first relationship with 'Rick,' when it became sexual, basically stopped being a friendship because all they would do when they got together was have sex. Before that, they were buddies going to concerts together and so on. Whereas my partner Cat in cjat would probably say Kirk was involved in a sort of rule-breaking sinfulness in that non-marital sexual relationship, I would just say that he and his friend fell short of the ideal that probably lived in both their hearts. I said 'ruefully' above because he expressed regrets to this effect. So this isn't about blame. Under other social conditions, perhaps they may have been all-out boyfriends for a period of time or even indefinitely. They weren't doing anything terrible, but this sort of emotionally stripped-down fuck-buddyhood is not what Christianity supports as a sufficiently ideal relationship to satisfy the higher ends of love. To appreciate that, you have to give a damn about the higher ends of love, so this will make little sense to anyone who has undertaken cynicism. I don't know if you have or not.

On the other hand, Kirk's later relationship with his playwright friend was a well constituted boyfriendship with affection, emotional support, and even parental approval - despite being illegal in that jurisdiction.

Cjat by policy does not exhort people to break the law, but this relationship would have been legal in many nearby jurisdictions. The Quaker (Society of Friends) church decided in the 1950's that mutually supportive same-sex relationships were approvable as marriages despite the lack of state infrastructure for this; and, where it is legal, based on similar reasoning, I would fully approve this relationship. For what it's worth.

I'm sorry to take a case in point rather than generalizing, but to generalize would make a long essay.

I will just make one more point, though, and that is that I think the pro-Sandusky people here should study the relationship of Kirk and Rick and try to understand why it was probably completely different from the compliance-adulterated relationships (boys allowing sex out of dutifulness to the mentor and as a sacrifice for their other social goals) that I think are the most reasonable interpretation of the Sandusky relationships.




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