Hi Will, Nice to hear from you again, it's been a long time. I've often wondered about Holt, too (of course) since he never seemed to have adult intimate relationships, from what I can tell, and his closest friendships seemed to be with kids. It's hard for me to imagine that he had anything fundamentally against man/boy love even if he never wrote about it. It was very sad when I learned that he had died and so relatively young. I had hoped to meet him. I called, I believe it was his bookstore in Boston, and asked for him and the lady who answered the phone told me that he had recently died. I first read him when I was a kid, myself. I was about twelve or thirteen when I first read "How Children Fail." There were other writers during that period - the late 60s and early 70s, writing about liberating kids to varying degrees and creating freedom-based education for kids, such as Jonathan Kozol, Paul Goodman, A.S. Neill (the founder of Summerhill, James Herndon, Neil Postman and Herb Kohl. None of these were quite as inspiring (at least to my early-teen imagination) as Holt. The period, of course, was a hotbed of radical freedom that was only the more radicalized by the Vietnam War and "free schools" seemed like the future. Alas, it died, along with so many other dreams, in the darkness of the unfolding 70s, when angry scolds took over the women's movement and neo-conservatism started to organize itself into a force against the 60s. For anyone who didn't live through it (from our perspective) it's hard to overstate how ominous did the ever-darkening landscape of oppression appeared. But who knew just how bad it could get? When child porn was made illegal to produce or sell about 1977 (but not to possess which was still legal), probably marked the beginning of the nightmare along with increased prosecutions for AOC. And then there were the serial killers who murdered boys. That had to be the death-knell. |