Post a response:
|
1)...families (of the usually Nuclearized kind, btw) HAVE TRIED TO DESTROY ALL natural dissent from The Social Order. And thus the reaction. Families are conservative, in that they seek a nice safe community in which to bring up their kids in a nice safe way. Growing adolescents rebel against this as a natural part of moving away from parental control, but the process needs to be coherent. The lunatics of the 70s decided they were gonna join with the boys to DESTROY the family. So it was the stupidly immature leading the immature. It was a strategy always doomed to the disaster we saw play out. The safe-community principle got perverted into something pernicious after WWII – reaction against all the horror of war and depression led to the 50's suburban sterility and repression. Hence the 60s revolution. During the 70s, families went into protection mode, reacting against what they saw as a movement threatening their kids' futures. Drug, hustling, and free-love cultures were attracting 13yos. Tom Reeves writes about this in his 1978 Fag Rag piece collected in The Age Taboo. He writes of the boy-love culture in Baltimore, one that had a history going back to WWI. But as the 60s arrived, it started attracting much more attention – attention from fags wanting hot young ass, and from the do-gooders crying out in alarm. Reeves loves the radical, rebellious nature of it all. He gets a 13yo boyfriend who already has a heroin habit, and he doesn’t see it's his place to interfere with the boy's choice. Wouldn't want to be a square and ruin the buzz, man. Well, if that's the way you want it, then applying a 18+ age limit sounds about right to me. The problem is these guys deliberately rejected Greek Love as sexist and ageist, and put in its place an extension of fag identity through hedonistic sex. As you say, there's plenty of cross-over between faggotry and boy-love. But when men apply the fag approach to 13yo boys, you end up with scenarios like you and Icarus describe. Men at their worst, boy-love sunk into degraded decadence. Seems to me that there are ALL SORTS of organic groups doing all sorts of things (which you and me may never be privy to!), so i wouldn't agree with you on that one. Yes but what did the movement coalesce around? It coalesced around fag free-love. That's what boy-love got judged and condemned on. It's this that prompted the savage age-related reaction. If fags want to fuck themselves to death, literally, let 'em, but the average citizen rightly said a firm NO to involving adolescent boys. If you read literature like Edward Brongersma's Loving Boys, you see the great tragedy of the missed 70s opportunity. Brongersma has a huge collection of anecdotal testimony, from boys and men, about their relationships around this time and before. The overwhelming majority are positive. They are full of organically arising Greek love qualities. They take place outside the hoopla of the rad revolution. They are quiet, discreet, and conservative in nature. Teachers, coaches, youth leaders, men next door, carefully start up loving relationships where making a positive impact on the boy's life at home and at school are almost unavoidably part of the deal. But usually deliberately. It adds to the hotness, frankly. So this most natural and traditional aspect of pederasty should have become the what the activist movement was about. They should have sharply distinguished themselves from the gay lesbo feminist movement. Greek love should have been embraced rather than rejected in the most shallow, stupid, selfish, destructive way. The ultimate radicalism in Baltimore in the 70s would have been to start up some quiet, conservative groups or clubs where good old loving mentorship, complete with boyloving-appropriate decorum, was the ruling principle. |