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Teachers, students, and sex

Posted by Pharmakon on 2024-April-13 04:54:20, Saturday
In reply to kit has pretty much said it all... posted by Sick Rose on 2024-April-12 21:41:08, Friday

I am not really ready to write about this, but, the topic having been raised, I guess I need to at least mention two relevant pieces of fiction:

(1) "The Bicycle Rider" in Guy Davenport's short story collection The Jules Verne Steam Balloon.

(2) The Folding Star, a novel by Alan Hollinghurst.

Both involve teachers, students, and sex. I wound up reading both (actually I am not quite finished with the Hollinghurst) because they were mentioned by Michael Matthew Kaylor in the closing chapter of his book Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde (thanks again to Manny for alerting us to this valuable work; see link below). Kaylor quotes extensively from the Davenport story (and one or two others from the same volume). He brings in Hollinghurst to compare him, unfavorably, with Davenport.

Though others have posted here about Davenport, I don't recall any mention of the fact that "The Bicycle Rider" is explicitly based on -- really a reimagining of -- the 1978 Lasse Nielsen film You Are Not Alone (itself, of course, the source of BoyChat's page-topping motto). Davenport retains the name Kim for the younger of the two boys; the older, named Bo in the film, he calls Anders. The actor who played Bo was Anders Agensø. Kaylor describes the setting of "The Bicycle Rider" as an idealized "Arcadian Denmark" -- more idealized, I think, than the film. He also adds characters I don't recall from the movie, though it's been years since I watched it. As an example of the "blending of pedagogy and touch" practiced by Hugo, the school's assistant Classics master in the story version, Kaylor cites a passage beginning:

Lizard, the Greeks called it, Hugo said, flipping Kim’s penis with a nonchalant finger.


If that doesn't interest you in reading the story, I don't know what would.

Kaylor notes that one critic called The Folding Star "a more elaborate and explicit version of Henry James's story 'The Pupil'" -- part of the reason I decided to read that particular Hollinghurst novel, since I had recently read the James novella. (The Folding Star, published in 1994, was on the Booker prize short list; Hollinghurst's 2004 novel, The Line of Beauty, won it.)

Kaylor faults Hollinghurst for failing, in contrast to Davenport, to live up to the pederastic ideals of the Uranians. Is this unfair? He levels much the same charge at Oscar Wilde. It's true that Uranian theory (mostly?) did not endorse actually fucking the boys you fell in love with, but much of the interest of Kaylor's book lies in his questioning whether their practices always conformed to this theory. He also frequently notes that those with reputations to protect, like Walter Pater and Gerard Manley Hopkins, may have been risk averse for practical as much as for ethical reasons (though Hopkins was also a priest and took his religious vows quite seriously, to the surprise of some of his friends from university days). Hollinghurst, writing in and about the 1990s, is from a quite different world and in any case is not concerned with idealizing it.

The pupil in The Folding Star is 17 -- the one in James' story is 11 when he and the teacher meet -- and in a footnote Kaylor cattily suggests Hollinghurst is deliberately only dipping a toe into the pederastic waters:

In Hollinghurst’s novels, the protagonists have an uncanny ability to acquire boys of seventeen, which suggests that Hollinghurst (at the time he was writing them) was allowing his protagonists to transgress Britain’s then-current age-of-consent laws..., though without allowing those transgressions to raise too many eyebrows. It is my hunch that his future protagonists will fetishize and acquire boys of fifteen.


(UK age of consent was lowered to 16 in 2000.)

Here, too, Kaylor is perhaps being unfair. Hollinghurst's interest in adult male homosexuality seems to me to be genuine (he's rather obsessed with dick size), and while most of us here may not share it, he is under no obligation to take on the task of being a modern Uranian just because it suits Kaylor's academic agenda. Besides, most of the infatuations Kaylor documents among the Uranians were with "boys" of university age or even older.

I don't doubt, however, that Hollinghurst is happy to have the Booker on his resume, and is well aware that writing about the sex lives of early teen and preteen boys, as Davenport has done, would likely be disqualifying.

hugzu ;-p


Pharmakon
  • (Boychat.org link) Secreted Desires:The Major Uranians-M.Kaylor[link] (Manstuprator post)

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