DRAFT CONTRIBUTION
INTENDED FOR BBC re
PAEDOPHILIA

 

 

At the BBC’s 'Talking Point',* as of 11th April 1998, 72% of the BBC's visitors had voted that 'paedophiles' should be jailed for life.
*  http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/talking_point/
    AND

   http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/talking_point/newsid_74000/74868.asp
   

 

“The media of 1996 invariably tended to conflate classical paedophilia, pederasty, child murder and even serial killing.” -- Chris BRAND’s 1998 response to Edinburgh University Tribunal, http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/McDNLArch3b.htm.
For details of paedohysterical violence in Britain, see TgF NewsLetters, 1997 (http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html).

 

 

I wish a distinction were more often made in the media between ‘paedophilia’ and ‘child sex killing.’ After Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) is the English author who is best known world-wide. Though a leading mathematician and Oxford academic of his day, Carroll not only wrote many stories with young girls like his ‘Alice’ in mind. He also took photographs of such girls as scantily clad as he could arrange; he told his sister that he spent 50% of his waking hours planning, undertaking and reflecting upon his assignations with these girls; and he eventually proposed marriage to his long-standing favourite, Alice Liddell, when she was seventeen. (For reference, see: History Today 46, 5, 1996, 'A picture of innocence', Charles Townsend; and Observer, 8th March 1998, Natasha Walter.) (However, some represent Carroll more as an ephebophile, saying that his relatives played up his liaisons with under-14's because 14 was in those days the age at which girls were first expected to excite sexual interest -- http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/landow/victorian/carroll/dreamchild/dreamchild2.html.)
      Likewise the sexual/romantic tastes of the great Anglo-Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) -- at 35, when he was a father of two sons and disillusioned with his wife -- apparently ran to boys "very far below age 20" (New Yorker, 18th May 1998, Adam Gopnik). England’s revered comic actor and priapic millionaire, Sir Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977), apparently left the U.S.A. because of the  F.B.I.’s bringing "a morals charge with yet another under-age girl" (Literary Review v ‘98, Sheridan Morley; also xi ’98; and APBnews.com 20 iii ‘00). 
      I hope no-one would urge that any modern of equivalents of Carroll, Wilde or Chaplin would need to be ‘locked up and the keys thrown away.’ The idea that classical paedophilia is associated with exploitative behaviour – and even with violence or other harm to children --  has no foundation in forensic and psychological research. (See New Statesman, 21st  August 1992, Edward Barrie -- summarizing work by M. C. Baurmann for Germany’s Justice Department; and Journal of Sex Research 34, 3, 237-255, 1997, ‘A meta-analytical review of findings from national samples on psychological correlates of child sexual abuse’, Bruce Rind [Department of Psychology, Temple University] and Philip Tromovitch [Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania].)

 

      So why, today, do crimes by ‘paedophiles’ pre-occupy us more than crimes by homosexuals, alcoholics and car drivers? -- Or more than the seldom-punished sex crimes by young teenagers that not uncommonly result in pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases for the under-age and immature teenage victims?

1)   Children today are at greater risk from aggressively sexual advances by strangers than they were in former times. Because of the closure of many asylums and mental subnormality hospitals, there are more dangerous people living ‘in the community’; and, like the rest of us, these people are exposed to an unprecedented diet of totally explicit pornography. Notoriously, in psychological researches, people of low mental ability readily imitate screened violence. Serious assaults on youngsters -- by other youngsters as well as by disturbed and low-IQ adults -- are a price society is paying for these freedoms.

2)   Changes in the evidence coming before the courts has made prosecution easier. In the past half-century, advances in the scientific testing of samples of clothing, blood, sperm and genetic material testing have meant that prosecutions can be brought, sometimes dating back many years, that would not have been attempted in the past. Moreover, courts have been increasingly willing to accept evidence from children without normal cross-questioning being allowed to the defence. Increases in convictions of genuine criminals must be welcomed; but, unless set in their context of changes in evidence to courts, they contribute to an atmosphere of moral panic.

3)   When reporting awful assaults on children, the press has sought a handy and expert-sounding name. Rather than use the term pederasty -- often used in British psychiatric practice to refer to aggressive sex crime against children, and especially sodomy (R. E. KENDELL & A. K. ZEALLEY (1988), Companion to Psychiatric Studies, Edinburgh, Churchill Livingstone; TgF NewsLetters 11 xii ’96 and 7 vii ’97) -- the press has been happy to oblige the ‘gay’ community by avoiding a term that might draw any attention to the sometimes very youthful tastes of homosexuals. Instead, the press has chosen to lump sadistic sex killers of young children with the likes of Lewis Carroll. The term paedophilia, which once referred in British psychiatrists’ usage to a distinct, even exclusive sexual preference for notoriously non-violent frottage with children around puberty, has come to be used far more widely. (A remarkable characteristic of classical paedophiles is their great interest in the transition phase between childhood and maturity -- a phase which they doubtless, in some way that is not understood, failed to negotiate successfully themselves. Paedophiles are notoriously interested in the world of pubescent children and have far more patience with it than do parents. Many seek quite genuinely to help children grow up -- unlikely though their ambitions may seem.) An already disliked group of people -- for parents seldom welcome any sexual advances to their teenage children, even from other teenagers -- paedophiles thus have a new burden. Classically considered perfectly normal in ancient Greece, India and south-east Asia and in modern Papua New Guinea, paedophiles have found themselves targeted in the West not just as ‘dirty old men’ who should face jail for entirely non-violent offences, but as depraved and ‘obsessive’ sex maniacs who stop at nothing, even in their seventies, to forcibly violate and murder children, and thus deserve castration at best.

4)   As this development in public 'perception' took place around 1990, psychiatric and psychological experts declined to oppose it. Why?
(a) It was clear that tabloid editors paid no attention to long-standing research evidence (especially in Britain) that pubescent-focused-paedophilia (PFP) did little harm -- especially to boys, who invariably proved able to cope with it in their own ways (sometimes by lucrative blackmail of the paedophhile). Notably, Baurmann’s comprehensive new research evidence from eight thousand cases of ‘child molestation’ in Germany went unremarked.
(b) Experts had discovered nothing about the causes of PFP -- any more than about other sexual orientations (homosexuality, transvestism, sado-masochism, undinism, bestophilia etc.) so felt no enthusiasm for participating in public discussions that would expose their own professional inadequacies.
(c) As child sex offenders and their protectors (often staff at probation hostels) were attacked by mobs whipped up by talkative policemen and tabloid newspapers, experts were still more reluctant to comment -- anticipating, possibly, that a university might even sack an academic who ‘outraged’ the media by mentioning the facts of life about classical PFP.

5)   Press-classified-paedophilia (PCP) filled a convenient slot for the down-market newspapers. In former times, ‘witches’, 'the Hun', ‘slum landlords’, ‘fat cats’ and 'the Gnomes of Zurich' [international financiers refusing Britaain more loans] could be blamed by mobs and by newspapers for a wide range of ills. These groups of demonized targets had little way of fighting back -- until people accused of witchcraft slowly learned (by the eighteenth century) to level the same charge against their accusers, until the private rented sector collapsed and was replaced with vandalized council tower blocks (by 1975), and until supporters of capitalism could show (by 1985, thanks to Russia’s President Gorbachev) the far worse poverty, injustice and misery that occurred under communism.

 

      Such are the origins of today’s moral panic which has resulted in suicides by gifted teachers in Britain and France, in frail and elderly men being jailed for non-violent crimes of thirty years ago, and in a payout of $800,000,000 in compensation by the US Catholic Church alone. Yet should paedophiles not be judged by such demonstrable harm as any of them cause rather than by the post-dated ‘revulsion’ of tabloid editors who have only lately learned to spell the word ‘paedophilia’? There are many worse things that can happen to a child in today’s world of broken families and early-onset sex than to meet a Carroll, a Wilde or a Chaplin.
      Sex-killing, demonstrably injurious assaults, rape, bullying, deception and manipulation of youngsters are outrageous whether committed by ‘paedophiles’, reckless homosexuals, drunken heterosexual step-parents or experimenting teenagers. Furthermore, all penetrative sex should perhaps require parental consent until age 18* (or until marriage, if earlier) -- thus assuring parents of proper control over children who are, after all, still financially dependent upon them. Yet, while experimenting with drugs and sex is commonplace for even the youngest teenagers today, only evidence of harm -- so far conspicuous by its absence (except in some individual cases) -- can justify special, extra criminalization of teenagers’ sexual contacts with adults. Unless harm is demonstrated, who would wish to use the devastating sanction of incarceration to prevent mature teenagers from having whatever (non-penetrative) experiences and relationships they choose with the likes of Lewis Carroll -- or with the Nobel Prize winner for medicine who lately served a year in jail in the USA for ‘child molestation’? Children of twelve and under doubtless need all the protection which the law currently provides; but intelligent teenagers must surely be trusted to make some of their own choices -- as they evidently do in Britain today about enjoying sex and drugs with people of their own age. In this age range, the law must surely protect teenagers from pregnancy, disease and manifest harm -- not rule out all sexual/romantic experimentation and risk falling into contempt (as when people like Nobelist Gajdusek and schoolteacher Mary Kay Letourneau are jailed). Naturally, if research shows that harm typically results from adult-child sexual contacts -- as it might from Ecstasy-fuelled countryside raves or from the common parental practice of supplying alcohol to minors -- the law’s punishments can serve as a useful deterrent. Sadly, proper research and consideration of the question of harm must remain unlikely while British universities can sack without warning any of their psychologists who dare to question in public the received wisdom of Britain’s tabloid press about ‘paedophilia.’ 

 

* A more psychologically sensitive proposal would be to use Mental  Age 15 as a boundary -- such that penetrative sex with children under MA 15 would always be open to interpretation as 'sex with a minor' and punished accordingly. Requiring a youth to have an MA of 15 before a partner would face no risk of prosecution for non-violent and non-threatening sex would mean that 12-year-old children of IQ 125 and over could give consent to full sexual activity, as could 18-year-old children of IQ 84 and over. (This probably reflects what many parents tolerate de facto today. To continue to offer legal protection to dull 18-year-olds – and to older dullards -- from sexual exploitation would seem an especially good idea: such low-IQ teenagers are especially prone to unwanted pregnancies (see Brand, 1996/2001, The g Factor).

 

A PERSONAL NOTE

I do not say the above lightly. I was dismissed from my 26-year position as a psychologist at Edinburgh University because I urged clemency for a 73-year-old Nobel prizewinner -- a bachelor who was threatened with thirty years in prison for non-violent ‘molestation’ of one of his own teenage adopted sons. The court that sentenced Carleton Gajdusek in Maryland did indeed show him leniency: it awarded the Nobelist a 1-year prison term, and Gajdusek is now free once more and is pursuing his scientific career in biochemistry laboratories in Europe. Yet Edinburgh University was not so lenient with me. Professor Sir Stewart Sutherland, Principal of Edinburgh University, said (Student [Edinburgh University’s student newspaper], 25 ix 1997): "Aspects of Mr Brand's conduct -- and particularly his comments on paedophilia -- have been of a disgraceful nature, incompatible with the duties of his office or employment.”  Thus my career has been sacrificed to modern ‘paedohysteria’ and I will be able to regain a position as an academic psychologist only by taking expensive and uncertain legal action.
      I sympathized with Gajdusek that he was called to answer charges arising from a decade or two previously. When crimes have infringed morality rather than causing demonstrable harm, it seems to me that people who feel outraged should protest near the time. Notoriously, it is hard for people to defend themselves against ancient charges; and failure to prosecute in a timely manner means that prosecution depends on arbitrary features (such as whether someone has some unrelated grudge against the accused). Quite a few countries and U.S. states have ‘statutes of limitations’ against prosecuting ancient offences; and, till about 1980, crimes of more than ten years antiquity were seldom prosecuted in Britain. I think we should revert to that practice -- as does Sandy McCall Smith, the Professor of Medical Law at Edinburgh University. 
      However, the main reason that I have opposed paedohysteria is because it demeans the many people who have made the best -- instead of the worst -- of their childhood experiences. Through twentieth-century psychological research, it has become clear that people are largely the authors of their own fates rather than being ‘victims.’ It is paedohysteria that is often harmful to children -- probably even to children who have never been exposed to the attentions of a ‘paedophile.’ Paedohysteria is the last gasp of the tired idea that we are all the creatures of our ‘environment’ and its ‘conditioning’ and ‘victimizing’ processes. It is being used to express the sentiment of some ‘feminists’ that men are a menace to women and children and should be made to live in terror that the criminal law will be unleashed upon them at any moment if they put a foot wrong -- in particular, if they say a word against feminism. (My own sacking from Edinburgh, ostensibly for discussing race, IQ and paedophilia, was in fact pursued most keenly by ‘feminists’ whom I had outraged over the years.) In fact, teenage children of reasonable intelligence are capable of making their own decisions in many sexual matters -- much as their parents would probably prefer them to abstain from serious sexual contact altogether until age 18. To jail -- or condemn to ceaseless risk of prosecution and suicide -- intelligent men or women who have had sexual relationships with young teenagers is to burden teenagers both with guilt and with an idea of their own parents and society at large as living pathetically on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A society that jails an elderly Nobelist for an affectionate embrace with his teenage son invites the ridicule of today’s teenagers and will soon receive it; so will one that uses the criminal law to hound a spirited thirty-year-old woman who falls for a strapping fourteen-year-old football star who reciprocates her affection. While we pride ourselves, a century after imprisoning Wilde, that we are tolerant, we have much to do to articulate that tolerance in a coherent way; and we are unlikely to get far while we allow our ‘universities’ to sack academics who speak the truth. 


For regular news coverage of paedohysteria in Britain and the dangers it poses for civil liberty (especially for men) and for the education of children, see The William McDougall NewsLetter at the website http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk.

 

 

chris brand, edinburgh

November, 1998

 

For updated coverage of 'Babe Baggers' (men having female partners markedly younger than themselves), see http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/index4.htm.

 

 

FURTHER NOTES

 

1.  (FAMOUS) ?-PAEDOPHILES (with under-16’s) OF THE PAST

 

"The predominant impression one gets of Confucius from the Analects is of a man whose life was full of joy. ….When, after a lifetime of moral cultivation, he found that what he desired naturally coincided with what was moral, that he should have experienced joy is understandable. But the joy was not confined to the moral side of his life. On an occasion when he was with a group of his disciples, Confucius asked them to state what they would most like to do. When they had finished, Confucius showed that his sympathies were with Tseng His who had said, "In late spring, after the spring clothes have been newly made, I should like, together with five or six adults and six or seven boys, to go bathing in the River Yi and enjoy the breeze on the Rain Altar and then go home chanting poetry." (Analects 51.26.)
      D. C. LAU, 1979, Introduction to The Analects. Harmondsworth : Penguin.
"Tzu-lu said [to Confucius], 'I should like to hear what you have set your heart on. The Master said, 'To bring peace to the old, to have trust in my friends, and to cherish the young.'
      Confucius, Analects V.26.

CRB: C is usually thought to have had a devoted lifetime partner, c. 20 years younger, whose love for Confucius began in early adolescence.

“In his youth, Pelops [the legendary founder of the Olympic Games – originally held in the nude] was kidnapped by Poseidon [the promiscuous god of the sea and earthquakes, brother of Zeus] to be the god’s love object.”
      Erich SEGAL, 2003, ‘Flesh tones and unfair play’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 iv. (Reviewing T. F. Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics.)

In his Symposium, Plato suggests that the love of a boy by a man is the highest form of love, since it goes beyond mere necessity and serves a pedagogical function. In the famous story (described by philosopher-novelist Iris Murdoch as highly erotic), Socrates sits on a couch at a late-night drinking party with two young lovers.

Alexander the Great was "bonkers about boys" according to a thus-titled article in London Review of Books, 1 xi 01, by James Davidson. Some authorities say Alexander would go with any boy over 12 years, but Davidson prefers to think he limited his attentions to "ephebes" of around 15. Boys provided Alexander's close guards and playmates, though they would bring girls to him as well.
The love of boys among the Pashtun (Afghanistan) and other Muslim groups is said to date back to the days of the emperors Alexander, Tiberius and Hadrian.

Jesus himself is recorded (in the 1973 discoveries of fragments from the original Secret Gospel of Mark) as having spent at least one night with a scantily (or possibly not-at-all) clad “young man” [“the young man went to him, dressed only in a linen cloth”].

The Roman biographer and antiquarian Suetonius makes reference to the "little fishes" who delighted the second Roman Emperor. Tiberius (42BC-37AD) supposedly reserved the island of Capri so he could practise paedophilia. He had small boys trained to swim in his pool with him, darting between his legs and fondling his private parts. Suetonius condemned Tiberius because he "taught children of the most tender years, whom he called his little fishes, to play between his legs while he was in his bath. Those which had not yet been weaned, but were strong and hearty, he set at fellatio." Suetonius may or may not have made up the story, yet he obviously had reason to think his readers would believe him. So, apparently, did Tacitus, who told the same story.
Gore Vidal thought Tiberius liked ten-year-old girls too.
"On retiring to Capri, Tiberius made himself a private sporting- house, where sexual extravagances were practiced for his secret pleasure. Bevies of girls and young men, whom he had collected from all over Europe as adepts in unnatural practices, and known as spintriae, would copulate before him in groups of two and three to excite his waning passions." "Imagine [Tiberius] training little boys, whom he called his 'minnows,' to chase him while he went swimming and get between his legs to lick and nibble him." (http://www.cleansheets.com/articles/darvell_02.06.02.shtml)
Prepuberal castration has also long been practised to produce catamites. Some catamites, such as those of the Roman Emperor Tiberius, were unaltered boys, usually transvestites, either by choice or else by coercion, but many were youths who were castrated before puberty. Alexander the Great is said to have had such a catamite "The Persian Boy" (who gives his name to a novel by Mary Renault) whom he dearly loved, and who remained with him until Alexander's death. This practice continues in southern India until the present day. (Castration was widely used in ancient Rome for domestic servants.)

Queen Maeve of Connaught and Scathagh was, in Celtic legend, a warrior from the Isle of Skye who taught the arts of war to Cuchulainn, the greatest warrior of Celtic tradition, as well as sexually initiating him at the age of seven…. (Guardian, 13 iii '98, Martin Wainwright)

Saint Augustine acquired a ten-year-old girlfriend when he was in his thirties (Confessions, Book III). Initially, the saint planned to wait to marry her at the then legal age of twelve; but in fact the girl {or another – J. Keating} fell pregnant and left him with a son before Augustine had got around to tying the knot. Of course, Augustine wept buckets as well as swiftly taking another mistress. But twentieth-century paedophiles also avail themselves of the consolations of Christian repentance.

“The Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination, is preparing missionaries to be sent to Iraq. Jerry Vines, the group’s former president, has denounced Muhammad, the founder of Islam, as “a demon-possessed paedophile who had 12 wives”. (Times, 20 iv 2003) Critics (e.g. Rev. Jerry Falwell, http://www.inoohr.org/falwell.htm; Sunday Telegraph, 26 ix, p. 12) and encyclopaedias (Free Encyclopaedia, http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Aisha) typically maintain that Mahomet had between 15 and 25 wives, and nine at his death, and that one of them, A’isha (or Aisha), of whom he had dreamed when she was 4-5, was married to him at age 9 (or possibly 8 since the nine-year estimate probably involved a lunar calendar), when Muhammad was himself 54. Defenders (e.g. Jamaat –e-Islami Pakistan http://www.tinseltownonline.com/member_photos/library/22-2621.jpg prefer to say that betrothal took place somewhere between Aisha’s 6th and 10th birthdays but that consummation did not occur till 9-13 or just possibly later. (Defenders suppose the marriage may have been made for political rather than sexual reasons, perhaps even to protect the young Aisha in a hard and violent world; and they note that Islam itself has no general lowest age restriction on marriage or intercourse – all that is required is that the girl or her guardian give genuine consent.) Though the 45-year-age-gapped marriage lasted only nine years (till Mahomet’s death at age 63), Aisha proved a successful interpreter of her husband’s views and was finally honoured (to this day) with the title ‘Mother of all Believers.’

Edward II of England notoriously kept catamites and was killed having a red hot poker inserted up his back passage.

Donatello - 1386-1466 Sculptor - Donatello is regarded as the greatest sculptor of the fifteenth century. He revived and refined the art of classical sculpture in the round, and many of his works are explicitly homoerotic. His David is lissome, and his St. George became emblematic of beauty for admirers of the male form. Donatello was notorious for his love of boys. A surviving story has him chasing, with murderous intent, a young man whose beauty charmed the artist into forgiveness on sight.

A poet described the married Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516) in bed with a boy (http://www.glbtq.com/arts/eur_art7_renaissance.html).

Leonardo da Vinci is normally said to have been the “lover” of a boy he called Salai [‘Little Devil’] after he adopted him (for money) when he was age 42 and the boy was aged 10 (e.g. Queen’s Gallery Exhibition, Autumn 2002; Sunday Telegraph, 11 v 2003). It is possible Leonardo abjured sex (e.g. http://www.stoke5399.freeserve.co.uk/leo/speculation-sex.htm) for he had once been accused (and acquitted) of sodomy with a 17-year-old; but he did leave a drawing of a penis on two legs pointed towards a hole labelled Salai. Salai and Leonardo stayed together for 26 years, till Leonardo’s death in 1519, though reputedly Leonardo took other young boys as lovers. Leonardo left Salai almost a half of his estate, the rest going to another young man with whom he had become involved.

Michelangelo (1475-1564) was so into men that he even used male models for his sculptures of women. His female statues for the Medici chapel look like Arnold Schwarzenegger with boobs. After his death, some proposed to whitewash the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
He sculpted his ubiquitous statue of David in 1504. This youth is said to have been his sexual type (and whose isn’t it)? For his next commission, he chose the subject of soldiers bathing in a river. Even though this painting was never carried out, his apparent obsession with “the naked male in many postures” created a great stir.

Raphael (1483-1520) painted a lovely “Jupiter Kissing Cupid,” among other homoerotic works.

During the years he worked at Cosimo de Medici's court, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) produced three marble sculptures of what he called Greek "fables" when referring to his own love for youths [under 18]. Each statue represented a beautiful youth with his male lover (Apollo and Hyacinth, Ganymede with Jupiter's eagle, Narcissus captivated by his reflection). (http://www.glbtq.com/arts/eur_art7_renaissance.html)
Cellini's works, including the marble statues of Ganymede and the Eagle, Narcissus, and Apollo and Hyacinth are particularly appealing to men who love boys. In Ganymede and the Eagle, the young Trojan boy lovingly ruffles the neck feathers of his seducer, while in Apollo and Hyacinth the mature Apollo ruffles the tousled curls of an expectantly receptive Hyacinth, on his knees at the god's feet.

John Knox, Scotland’s Protestant hero (c. 1513-1572), made his second marriage when he was 51 years old. Margaret Stewart, his bride, was some 14 years old on her wedding day. {John Knox House, Royal Mile, claims 17.}

(The age of Shakespeare’s homosexual lover in the Sonnets [e.g. XX: "the master-mistress of my passions" and CSXXVI: “O thou, my lovely boy”] is sometimes said to be unknown. But http://www.chowk.com/Gulberg/Hearth/spmahmed_aug3199.html says: “I suspect that the average English Literature reader would be surprised to learn that the best of Shakespeare’s sonnets, those immortal love poems, immortalized not Lady so-and-so, but 10-year-old William, Earl of Pembroke.  Fascist-like misinformation has kept hidden from millions of Shakespeare lovers the simple fact that the Bard’s most moving poetry is a love/angst concoct, despairing that ‘summer hath too short a lease’ on the boy/s of his desire.” It adds: “The Bard, Auden, Blake, Whitman, Alger, Mackay,  Goethe, Wilde, Barrie and (T.H.) White (1906-64) (novelist, interpreter of Arthurian legend) were all well-documented boylovers.”) In April, 2003, top Shakespearean actor Sir Ian McKellen, known to be gay, came out with his opinion that Shakespeare was “surely” homosexual, invokin part of the plot of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ where an older man is in some agony when called upon to finance his young boyfriend getting married. But in the Times (4 iv), Robbie Millen said “It’s all flapdoodle” and imagined that by such argumentation almost anyone could be put forward as homosexual/paedophilic. Millen dared his readers to try to make anything of the fact that Shakespeare invented a star character named ‘Bottom’ or that one of his best know speeches (Henry V at Harfleur) contains the cry “Once more to the breach, dear friends…!” Possibly excusing Shakespeare’s interest, Shakespeare scholar Diane Purkiss (Oxford University) told the Times (4 iv, p. 15): “….there was a cult of being attracted to young boys in 1590’s London.”

Robert Herrick (1591-1674, famous for ‘Cherry Ripe’)

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) ?boys; and at 46 married a 14-year-old. (Literary Review, 11 iii '98) McDNL3b:"The eminent British philosopher, statesman, supporter of science and man of letters, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), may have died famously while stuffing a bird, but his lifestyle had more generally involved an "overlarge retinue of gilded youths.""

Vivaldi had a notable taste for Viennese orphans and took in at least one underage girl who became his mistress.

Handel is sometimes thought to have been paedophilic.

King James I of England notoriously kept “little falcons” at his court and there is a famous picture of three of them with ‘bubble butts’ and erect penises – but they may just have been over 16.

Jonathan Swift? (He had met his Esther [whom he married ten years later] when she was 8, and he was 22.)

The sexually ravenous and magnetic Lord Byron (1788-1824) was bisexual and had several love affairs with boys and girls of well under 16, sometimes choirboys -- http://www.byronmania.com/byron/limnings.html and UK TV c. November 6, 2002. Though he married (with difficulty) his most beautiful love poetry was addressed to boys (‘So, we’ll go no more a-roving’ ‘’Tis time this heart should be unmoved’) -- http://www.spectator.co.uk/bookreview.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2002-11-30&id=1307. Lord Byron is today admitted to have been bisexual (as well as incestuous – with his half-sister), but in fact his homosexual affairs in England and the Mediterranean included young teenage boys – including a Cambridge choirboy who was arguably the love of his life.

Spring, 2003: Byron exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The show is reasonably be frank about Byron's "200 liaisons" with men, women and his half-sister, and his great affair with a choirboy. Appropriately enough, the first picture shows him at 30 with his clearlyvastly younger "beloved page boy."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge? [Though he may have deliberately underestimated the ages of women/girls with whom he was involved. -- Times Literary Supplement 25 vii ‘99]

The great French chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, found himself a 14-year wife when he was apparently around 40 -- hopefully a great consolation to him when he was guillotined for upsetting the French Revolutionaries. (From M. BRAGG, 1998, On Giants' Shoulders, London : Hodder & Stoughton.)

1811-14   The Marquis de Sade, aged 74 in 1814, had sexual relations on scores of occasions with Magdeleine Leclerc, 17 in 1814. Magdeleine was the daughter of a female worker at Charenton asylum, where Sade was detained (writing and producing plays until he died in December 1814). Sade paid money to Magdeleine, but the affair had the mother's approval. According to Neil Schaeffer (1999, The Marquis de Sade: A Life, New York, Knopf, [Picador papberback, p. 509]), Sade's first surviving journal entry for the affair dates from July 1814, recording Magdeleine's 57th sexual relation and 81st visit with him. Schaeffer remarks: "Clearly, their relations had begun long before the date of this journal entry." (Previous journals of Sade's are lost.) Several authorities on Sade date the couple's first sexual congress to 1811 or 1812 [p. 547, note 149]. There was apparently affection and attachment on both sides: Magdeleine would bring presents of stockings and Sade respected Magdeleine's reluctance to go in for the more bizarre sexual practices. The flavour is perhaps captured by Sade's 17 ix 1814 journal entry: "Mgl. made her 88th in all….Very agreeable, and never was I more pleased by her. She borrowed Le Portier des Chartreux [an 18th-century pornographic novel] and was very obligingly ardent, etc…." {Most of Sade's adult life was spent in confinement since he fell foul respectively of Louis XVI, Robespierre and Napoleon -- and, most important of all, his mother in law, after he had an affair with the sister of his devoted wife. His big problem was difficulty in ejaculating, though compounded by his determination to do so eight times daily. In 1784, Sade wrote of the 'stubborn refusal of his arrow to leave the bow.' Apparently, violent fantasies provided Sade with the necessary stimulus to orgasm. Sade always insisted he was a libertine but neither a criminal nor a murderer. Unlike Oscar Wilde, Sade never repented in his many years in prison, despite cruel treatment that would drive him to tears. See Richard Davenport-Hines, London Review of Books, 9 viii 01.}

"Women to {William Hazlitt, essayist and controversialist (1778-1830)} were primarily sex objects; he frequented prostitutes. Today his taste for fondling and slapping teenage girls might have him classified as a paedophile, and on one occasion it caused him to be chased by an angry mob [in the Lake District], as paedophiles are today."
    Alethea HAYTER, 2001, 'He loved to hate: Hazlitt's brilliant prose and broken friendships.' Times Literary Supplement, 12 i. {Hazlitt's two marriages failed. His most passionate affair was with late-adolescent daughter of a tailor with whom he lodged. See McDNL??}

Abraham Lincoln??

The art critic, essayist and Christian-communist John Ruskin (1819-1900) positively excelled himself with his “hopeless and poignant love for the nine-year-old Rose La Touche” (Literary Review vi ’99). See McDougall NewsLetters passim.

American poet Walt Whitman-I can send you some of his works. There is ducumented evidence of friendships with teenage boy soldiers who he nursed during the U.S. civil war.

Lewis Carroll? [see above] A c.1997 Penguin biography is emphatic as to LC’s paedophilic orientation and preoccupation. LC told his sister that he spent 50% of his time on his assignations with young girls – daughters of colleagues at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was Dean. A possibility is that LC was in love with the “voluptuous” mother of Alice Liddell -- but TLS 25 vii ’99 discounts that. Carroll's interest in photographing young girls and having young girl friends was especially pronounced in his own young adulthood. In 1894 he wrote (to Mrs Caroline Egerton): "20 or 30 years ago, 'ten' was about my ideal age for [girl-]friends: now 'twenty' or 'twenty-five' is nearer the mark." [Quoted by Karoline Leach, Times Literary Supplement, 8 ii 02, pp. 13-15 – in an article concerned to say that Alice Liddell was by no means Caroll's closest or most romantic involvement. Leach also notes that Carroll's younger brother, Wilfred, once courted a 15-year-old girl.]
    Times Literary Supplement, 15 ii 02,letter from Jenny Wolf, p. 17: "[Dodgson's] 1862 poem 'Stolen Waters' describes an out-of-control fornicator who eventually regains his longed-for closeness with God by identifying himself with children, because children know no evil." Wolf thinks this was Caroll's own case, in reality.
    Times Literary Supplement, 10 ix 04, ‘When love was young: failed apologists for the sexuality of Lewis Carroll’:   That Carroll’s affections were overwhelmingly paedophilic was forcefully re-asserted in a two-page review by Carroll’s 1995 biographer, Morton N. Cohen, who specially estimated that Carroll spent three-quarters of his time on his girls – though also saying that Carroll’s life “is a monument to kindness.” Specially telling evidence of Carroll’s sexual proclivities is that he cut relations with one girls for six months after being reproved by the girl’s mother. TLS supplied a beautiful photo taken of Alice by Carroll.

Lord (General) Gordon (1833-1885)
    http://www.duende.demon.co.uk/gordon.html:
"General Gordon was quite happy provided he could give the occasional bath to a dirty urchin and talk to him of God. But Gordon was probably unsuited to high responsibilities by the very fact of his not really caring about anything in life except his 'Gravesend laddies' or 'kings' as he repeatedly called them'."

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)? (See e.g. Christopher Hart, Daily Telegraph 17 x '97 and the BBC 2 film of Richard Ellman's biography [broadcast c. 29 xii 00].) Wilde denied sodomy and said his great lover Bosie preferred more vigorous (anal?) sex. After his imprisonment, he went on a Continental tour which apparently involved nights spent with boys who were emphatically under-16.
    "Wilde, as Max Beerbohm said, seemed determined to recreate, in late nineteenth-century London, the atmostphere of fifth-century Athens. He gathered around him youths who called him the "divinity", wore vine leaves in their hair on request, and who became the aeolian harps on which he played with his matchless talk." – Thomas WRIGHT, Times Literary Supplement, 9 ii 2001.

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) Prior to his late (1902) and unhappy marriage [2 children, one died], Mahler's chief involvement had been with a woman who had two children with whom Mahler was "excessively preoccupied" (biography in Ed. Central Music Library). In Thomas Mann's (later Luchino Visconti's film) Death in Venice, Mahler is represented as having paedophilic inclinations for a beautiful early-adolescent boy angel. Times 24 ii 01 (Play): "It is said that the author Thomas Mann once encountered a weeping, rumpled Gustav Mahler on a train from Venice to Munich." Visconti said this story – whether true or not – influenced Death in Venice.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was in love in London with his landlady’s daughter, Eugenie, but, after a year, found the girl had made a secret engagement to another man. Rejected by his first love, his father and his church, Vincent went on – contrary to the Gandhi like image of him held by today’s public -- to a lifetime of voracious brothel visitation -- including contracting syphilis. In May 2004, a major Channel 4 TV programme (presenter: the Polish Waldemar Januszczak) explained that top painter Vincent van Gogh had sex as often as possible with 13-14-year-old girls – and thus came in 1888 to be consigned to the asylum for ‘molesting’ by the good citizens of Arles (where he had presented one young prostitute with his hacked-off ear in an attempt to win a sexual competition for girls with the equally paedophilia-prone Paul Gauguin).

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) (review by Martin Gayford, Sunday Telegraph, 7 x 01): "[One view – that of biographer Nancy Matthews, 2001, Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life, Yale -- is that] he behaved with cruelty and selfishness towards his Danish wife, Mette, and the five legitimate children he had by her (there were quantities of other children, in Polynesia and France, to whom he paid no attention at all). In addition, she holds, he was an "abusive" husband with a tendency towards sexual violence, and a predilection for very young girls. ….He certainly had a series of liaisons with girls in early adolescence while living in the South Seas – but this, although reprehensible "sexual tourism", was also common in that time and place."
    More on Gauguin from Channel 5 TV, 30 x 01: Gauguin made two marriages in Tahiti, with girls of 13 and 14. He died of syphilis, alcoholism and other ailments at 54. He had been the archetypal bohemian artist, breaking with his middle class roots – he had been a financier.
    Literary Review ii 02: "….the young ages of his vahines (whores) indicate his penchant for sex with adolescents." He had lost his father at age 2. He had syphilis from virtually the moment he arrived in Tahiti. His paintings are just as Freud would have liked – devoted to sex and violence.

Frederick Rolfe (1860-1913) (styled Baron Corvo), English novelist and essayist. Converted to RC but was rejected for the priesthood. Graham Asher writes: "I would highly recommend 'The Quest for Corvo' by A. J. Symons (or Simons, can't remember) as an introduction to this extremely weird individual. Examples of weirdness: (i) in his history of the house of Borgia, refused to use the word 'poison', preferring 'venom' (noun) and 'envenom' (verb); (ii) in general, his vocabulary could outweird anybody: e.g., ' I cacchinate at your cecity' (I laugh at your blindness); (iii) in one of his books (Hubert's Arthur, I think), when new characters are introduced their heraldic coat of arms is described (something like 'Then entered Fred Bloggs, unguly or and vert, three martlets counterchanged proper, and sat down'). Rolfe ended his days in 1913, living on a small boat in Venice, interfering with the local lads. His best book and the only one easy to find is 'Hadrian VII', about a failed candidate for the priesthood (i.e., Rolfe) who somehow ends up as Pope.

The Scottish novelist and dramatist J. M. Barrie (1860-1937), a product of Edinburgh University, is usually considered to have been paedophilic in inclination – he befriended a family of five children and was perhaps their ‘Peter Pan’ (Peter Parker, 2004, ‘Young for ever’, Times Literary Supplement, 28 v).

(Lord Kitchener remained content with the adulation of "the band of boys who doted on him" (Times Literary Supplement, 21 viii '98). He admittedly deplored sodomy (Wall Street Journal, 1 iii 2001): he wanted an officer guilty of buggery to be shot, and when the officer shot himself Kitchener presumed the buggery could only have occurred because of temporary insanity. But plenty of paedophiles have no inclination to sodomy.)

(Rudyard Kipling especially enjoyed the company of boys and wrote affectingly of ‘Kim’ and ‘Mowgli’. British author Angus Wilson believed Kipling to have been an ‘unconscious paedophile’. -- See Allan Massie, 1999, Literary Review, i and McDNL 2 iii ’99.)

The most heroic paedophile of all time was surely Captain Laurence Oates, who committed suicide at 32 by 'going outside for some time' during Britain's doomed Antarctic expedition of 1912. It now turns out (in a new biography – reported Guardian 14 x 02) that, when Oates was around 20, he had an affair with a Scottish girl of under twelve years old, resulting (unknown to him) in the birth of a daughter (born secretly in Ireland). Oates' great-great granddaughter today says she feels no animosity and that she and her brother are proud of their connection to the great man.

Wilfrid Owen?, English WWI poet

T. E. Lawrence? (‘Florence of Arabia’) (Probably in love with 14-yr boy Dahoum: McDNL 31 iii ’98 [http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/McDNLArch3b.htm].) Google search ‘Lawrence Arabia homosexual’ suggests wide consensus on homosexuality, sado-masochism and even paedophilia: e.g. http://unverse.com/id-books-0750918772 (David Lean film allows that impression); http://unverse.com/id-books-0750918772 (“From 1911 to 1914 he joined the archeological digs of Hittite settlements under the direction of Flinders Petrie at Carchemish on the banks of the Euphrates river. Here T. E. Lawrence fell in love with the 15-year-old Arab peasant boy, Salim Ahmed, whom he called Dahoum. He brought him on holiday to England. T. E. Lawrence and Dahoum were inseparable until Dahoum disappeared in 1916. He was rediscovered in 1918 when he was found dying of typhoid…. The BBC radio play Castle of the Star, (1992), most explicitly presented this love.”)

Thomas Mann, authored Death in Venice and Tonio Kro'ger.

Charlie Chaplin? (according to FBI)

Earl Montgomery of Alamein (1887-1976)  (military genius and victor over German forces at El Alamein)?
    From http://www.duende.demon.co.uk/monty.html:
Evidence: From -- Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality - the British experience. Manchester University Press. Manchester and New York, 1990.
       "In Montgomery's case there is a confusion: he was not in the least attracted to men but he was emotionally involved with small boys." [Page 8]
    "...Montgomery, a man incontestably suited for high command if not for anything else. Sex was something he largely repudiated, even during ten years of marriage, and despite (or more likely because of) his deep-rooted tenderness for boys. Montgomery [had] a relentless generosity to his pre-pubertal proteges." [Page 14]
     "What is one to make of a man who wrote letters to boys which ended 'With my fond love, Montgomery of Alamein, F.M.' ? Or indeed, who told a superannuated sixteen-year-old 'I often wish you were twelve again' ? It is clear that Montgomery was not a happy man..." "Seeing the naked body of a boy seems to have been the limit of 'sexual aim' for him, as it had also been for General Gordon. But this a-sexual limitation was not sublimation; it is closer to what Freud called scopophilia [a variety of voyeurism]. It is also likely that Gordon and Montgomery were constrained by the legal and moral codes of their day. But, if so, that is not sublimation either; it is enforced repression."

             From http://www.humanbeing.demon.nl/ipceweb/Library/01mar16e_monty%202.htm

Official biographer agrees Monty fell in love with boys

Field Marshal Montgomery, Britain's most famous second world war commander, fell in love with young boys, according to his official biographer.

Nigel Hamilton has written a book, The Full Monty, in which he claims that the man who conquered the German army in north Africa in 1942 had a passion for many boys, some not yet in their teens.

Hamilton said he had long suspected the soldier's sexual leanings but did not mention them in his earlier work - a three-part authorised biography published in the 1980s - out of respect for his subject. Now he feels compelled to tell the full story, revealed in a series of letters from Montgomery. He says he has gained access to hundreds of letters. He now feels released from the arrangement with Montgomery's family that gave him access to material for his earlier work. That arrangement, Hamilton said, "tied my hands".

The author said he had no proof of a physical relationship between Montgomery and the many boys he befriended, though he has no doubt that he was passionately in love with them. One was Lucien Trueb, who Montgomery met in 1946 when the Swiss boy was just 12, and they corresponded over many years.

Hamilton, a visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, says his new book, to be published this summer, has not been written to destroy but to explain the reputation of a man he regards as a "revolutionary" commander.

"I've been curious to find out why he was such a revolutionary leader. I believe his sexuality is a key. His passion for young men helped him relate to his liaison officers and young staff. He felt a real concern for their welfare," said Hamilton.

Denis Hamilton served under Montgomery during the war and afterwards became his media adviser. When he worked on The Sunday Times in the 1950s, he bought the serialisation of Montgomery's war memoirs for the paper.

Montgomery became a national figure after leading the 8th Army to victory against Rommel at El Alamein. He also took British command at D-Day and in the subsequent military push by Allied ground forces into 'Fortress Europe'.

Born in 1887, he was said to have been unhappy as a child. He had a poor relationship with his mother and his brother died when he was only 13. He served in the first world war and devoted the rest of his life to the military. Hamilton believes Montgomery's passion for young boys may have been an attempt to "reconstruct his youth".

Hamilton said he himself had "a homoerotic" relationship with Montgomery, though it was not physical. "He called me 'son number two'," said Hamilton. "But it was also not just what you might call a father-son relationship."

{For rejection of criticism of the Monty story, see David Aaronovitch's column in the Independent, 28 ii 01: http://www.humanbeing.demon.nl/ipceweb/Library/01mar07a_monty1.htm.}

NB Monty had a happy marriage and was devastated when his wife died in the 1930's. He then (rather neglecting his son) threw himself into work with boys. – Times Literary Supplement 12 x 01.

"[As possibly repressed homosexuals,] both [General] Gordon and Montgomery, like Field Marshal Auchinleck, had a fascination with boys."
            Jeremy PAXMAN, 1998, The English: A Portrait of a People. London : Michael Joseph.

 

Bill Tilden, USA, the greatest tennis player of the first half of the 20th century.  (Frank Deford, maybe America's most respected sportswriter, wrote a very detailed book about his perversion. Nabokov mentions him in passing in Lolita:  Humbert Humbert hires the magnificent ruin "Ned Litden" to give tennis lessons to Lolita, and notes that he travelled everywhere with his "harem of ballboys".)

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) was a handsome bisexual who had an affair with a 15-year-old girl (Sunday Times 19 ix ’99 and McDNL 22 ix ’99).

Stephen Lowry (1887-1976), the painter of industrial Lancashire, loved an androgynous adolescent. (Guardian, 26 v '98; Daily Telegraph, 3 vi '98)

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) ? Favoured all sexual liberation.

Jorge Luis Borges, the avant-garde Argentinian writer (1899-1986), educated at Cambridge, married his long-standing companion, Maria Kodama, just a month before he died. Maria was the half-Japanese daughter of one of JLB's friends, and the pair had met when Maria was aged eight.

Hitler's general Erwin Rommel (1899-1944)? -- lionized in Berlin c. 1942, turned up for a splendid dinner party but went upstairs with the boy of the house and played with a trainset in the attic for the whole evening.

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) & Peter Pears (1910-1986). Britten wrote many choral works, used boys' themes (A Boy was Born, The Little Sweep, The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra), and wrote Death in Venice [about a paedophile, probably based on Gustav Mahler]. At one point in the 1950's, Britten was interrogated by police – though possibly about his (at that time illegal) relationship with Pears.
      From http://www.duende.demon.co.uk/benbrit.html:
      Britten was a highly acclaimed English composer. His operas - especially the first, Peter Grimes (1945), about child maltreatment - helped revitalize English opera, languishing since the time of Henry Purcell. He was a lifelong pacifist, and cruelty is a frequent theme of his works. He was made a life peer in 1976.
     Britten attended the Royal College of Music, and his early works comprise music for documentary films, radio dramas, and expressionist plays by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. Recognition came early in Britten's career with a performance in 1934 of the choral piece A Boy Was Born (1933). Three years (1939-42) of intense creativity in the United States produced many works, including a setting of Arthur Rimbaud's (Rimbaud had had a long love affair with the 16 year-old Paul Verlain*) 'Les Illuminations'. A large number of Britten's works feature boys as characters or performers or both.
     Britten worked in a traditional style and was not given to avant-garde experimentation. He possessed a remarkable ability to compose for voice and text, and his work is characterized by extremely personal instrumentation and melodies. Peter Grimes is particularly impressive for its turbulent chorus scenes and atmospheric sea interludes. The conflict between an honest man and a corrupt society is one frequently addressed by Britten.
     His non-operatic works include The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946), and The War Requiem (1961), written for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, is based on poems by Wilfred Owen. His operas include Let's Make an Opera (1949, written for children), and he explored youthful and child sexuality in Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw (1954) and Death in Venice (1973, based on the openly paederastic Thomas Mann novella).  
       The evidence:
Britten was also attracted to adult men, but his paedophilia is also ably documented, and many of Britten's relationships with young boys described in detail, in: Carpenter, Humphrey. Benjamin Britten - a Biography. London. Faber and Faber, 1992. 680 pages.
     For numerous discussions of Britten's attraction to 12-year-old boys, see: Mitchell, Donald. and Reed, Phillip. (Eds.) Letters From A Life - selected letters and diaries of Benjamin Britten. 2 vols. London. Faber and Faber, 1991.

*CRB NOTE: Rimbaud was the 10-year junior in the affair with Verlaine (which ended in the latter's imprisonment after he had shot Rimbaud in the wrist for trying to desert him). Verlaine had also loved (and eventually married) a 16-year-old girl.

Martin Luther King (1929-1968) (an ordained minister) liked sex with under-age girls and boys, according to FBI film that J.Edgar Hoover used to show to journalists. (Independent, 25 iv '98)

Mao Zedong (1893-1976)

"[By 1960] Mao himself had developed a personal life-style that was out of touch with many of his political colleagues. He had come to value the trappings of power, whether it was swims in the private pool built for him in the Zhongnanhai residence compound {swims sometimes involving scores of young teenagers} , the privilege of summoning his staff to meetings at any time of day or night, the pleasand sojourns in various villas (to which he could travel in his special train, or the sexual companionship of a succession of young women – whom he met either at the weekly Zhongnanhai dances or amidst the enthusiastic youthful followers he encountered on his train journeys. (For Mao's personal life, see the provocative and intimate account by Mao's doctor Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, New York, Random House, 1994)"
      Jonathan SPENCE, 1999, The Search for Modern China. New York : Norton.

Allen Ginsberg (1926-   ) (US poet) ? [Certainly supportive of ‘paedophile lib’ etc.]

A.E. "To an Athlete Dying Young" Houseman? -- Tom Stoppard's recent play, the Invention of Love (annoying title) is all about Houseman. Not clear, though, whether he lusted for boys or young men.
|
Walter Horatio Pater (1839-94) (King’s School, Canterbury; The Queen’s College, Oxford) ? -- in the same play, Pater is kicked out of Oxford for excessively intimate letters to an undergrad.

Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts?

Adolf Hitler, with his young female cousin but perhaps also with boys?

“[Stalin’s] police chief, Lavrenti Beria, was a sex maniac: young girls were kidnapped from the street, raped by Beria, and sent home with a bouquet of flowers.” Orlando FIGES, 2003, Sunday Telegraph 13 vii. Reviewing S. Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar, Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Cecil Rhodes, imperialist ? A recent PBS mini-series strongly implied a romantic connection between the middle-aged bachelor and his very young private secretary, but I didn't see any evidence that his feelings weren't,  instead, paternal or avuncular.

Anthony Burgess, novelist, b. 1917, claimed affairs with Malayan girls of 12 and 13 (Observer 19 ix ’99 and McDNL 22 ix ’99).

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) ?  Film director, e.g. of ‘Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom’. Died as a result of what was probably a homosexual encounter with one of Rome’s legendary boy prostitutes. His works exhibit a strong thematic continuity with his early youthful poetry, portraying the timeless innocence of Friuli, his mother’s birthplace. ‘Salo’ concerns the rounding of the town's young folk who are then tortured and sexually victimized.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit was once better known as Danni the Red, the "flame-haired firebrand" who led the student demonstrations in Paris in May 1968. You may remember that he was later deported to Germany, where he got involved in Green politics in the early Seventies. Right now he is a highly respected MEP for the French Greens. But there is bound to be some rapid repositioning following reports that he dabbled in paedophilia while working in a radical kindergarten in the early Seventies. Can it be true? Cohn-Bendit says it's pure fantasy. This is unfortunate, as he is the one who wrote it. He can be forgiven for failing to recall his incriminating words exactly. He wrote them 25 years ago, for a radical magazine called Das Da. "I wanted the children to like me," he recalled. "My constant flirt with all the children soon took on erotic characteristics. I could really feel how from the age of five the small girls had already learned to make passes at me... Several times a few children opened the flies of my trousers and started to stroke me... When they insisted, I then stroked them." (Reported by Maureen Freely, 'Polymorphous sexuality in the Sixties', Independent, 29 i 2001.)
    DC-B had been looking after children of fellow radicals who were busy training to throw bombs. According to the Observer (28 i 01), Bendit had written the children with whom he had flirted "say the experience was very positive for them."

Shulamith Firestone is best remembered for her dream of a world in which women were freed from maternity by turning reproduction over to test tubes. It is incredible that she is not more famous for saying she hoped that, in a world "without the incest taboo, adults might return within a few generations" and that "relations with children would include as much genital sex as they were capable of -- probably considerably more than we now believe". (Reported by Maureen Freely, 'Polymorphous sexuality in the Sixties', Independent, 29 I 2001.)

Channel V TV (8 v 01) explained that love between Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II first blossomed paedophilically when the prince was 19 and Princess Elizabeth was 14. According to the programme, Elizabeth was entirely "smitten" with and "mad about" the prince, and a correspondence began which led to marriage.
   In a letter to Prince Charles, Louis Mountbatten said, "….[your] Mummy never seriously thought of anyeone else [than Philip] after the Dartmouth encounter when she was 13!" – Kitty Kelley, 1997, The Royals, New York, Warner, paperback page 290.

 

---------------------------------------------------------

An impressive resource re paedophilia can be found on the Internet at 

http://home.hkstar.com/~neutre/brits.html. It provides a brief biography and

documented evidence of paedophile inclination in the case of: the military men Lord Gordon, Baden-Powell and 'Monty'; the writers John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie and T. H. White; the poet and novelist Algernon Swinburne; and the composer Benjamin Britten.

 

Another resource is: http://www.duende.demon.co.uk/

 

(In England the age of consent remained at 12 until 1885. It was only raised to 16 because of a spectacular case of child prostitution in which girls of 14 had been enslaved, privately imprisoned and sold.)

(Plus countless males in India, Spain, New Mexico, Maryland who have married girls well under the age of 16. It is the Hindu religion that perhaps takes most seriously a man's lifelong need for the younger female. It is common for Hindus -- typically much concerned with the preservation of a man's powers -- to believe that intercourse with young virgins is quite the least deleterious form of sexual activity.)

(It is perhaps worth remember that paedophilic practices in ancient Greece were of the inter-crural variety, and sodomy was not permitted.)

 

 

2.  (FAMOUS) ?-PAEDOPHILES OF TODAY

* = cases where one or more ‘victims’ would apparently speak strongly in favour of the accused

*  Carleton Gajdusek. FREDERICK, Maryland. (AP) 27 April ‘98 – Nobel Prize-winning scientist Daniel Gajdusek was released from jail today after serving a year in jail for sexually abusing a teen-age boy he brought home from a research trip to Micronesia.
      “….in September, he will begin a 6-month visiting professorship at the Department of Human Retrovirology of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, invited by virologist and AIDS researcher Jaap Goudsmit. Says Goudsmit, who was a postdoc in Gajdusek's lab from 1979 to 1981, "I'm very fond of him. He is still very smart, and he knows a lot about viruses. It will be wonderful to have him." Science 280, 1 v '98

* Arthur C. Clarke? [After media attack on his multi-boy lifestyle in Sri Lanka, agreed not to be dubbed Knight by Prince Charles, ’97. Claims to deplore ‘paedophilia.’ Apparently being rehabilitated at Times Newspapers – articles by him in Times Higher 20 xii 2000 and Times 29 xii 2000.]

* Gary Glitter (Paul Gadd), 53, charged in Britain with having kiddy porn on his computer, is shacked up in Havana with a 25-year-old sweetheart, the delightfully petite and boyish Yudenia Sosa Martinez.  [On trial Bristol, May ’98, denying ancient sex with teenagers and perhaps an 8-year-old. Finally cleared of serious charges but imprisoned for two months for downloading Internet kiddie porn.]

* Woody Allen? (As well as his relationship to his latest wife, Allen's films involve many cases of babe-bagging.)

* Mary Kay Le Tourneau, c. 36, Washington State [now 2 children by c. 15 yr-old ex-pupil] (Her lawyer is Susan Howards, Boston.) cf McDNL 24 xi ’98.

* Similar GB female, Tracey Whalin, 33, Mail on Sunday, 7 xii '97. Escaped to Florida ‘love-nest’ with strapping 13-year-old footballer.

* Stephen Vizinczey, author of 'An Innocent Millionaire' and 'In Praise of Older Women' had affair w. 34yr old when he was 14 ('The Scotsman', 30 vii '97).

John Logan, 36, Scotland, has fathered 7 children, starting his relationship when the mother was 13 [parents found condoms]. (Daily Mail 21 x '97)

* Schoolteacher Lucy Hayware, 30, Shrewsbury, has two daughters, a 15-year-old boyfriend and a jail sentence. (Times, 16 vii '98; Daily Telegraph, 18 vii '98)

Richard Botham, 35-year-old riding instructor and a 13-year-old girl. ('Daily Express', 28 vi, Mark Radcliffe)

Samantha Geimer, who claimed she was raped by Roman Polanski when she was 13, says she is "happy at last", and hoped Roman could be too, and urged Americans to forgive him ('Mail on Sunday', 23 iii '97). (Samantha admits pretending to Polanski to be a self-possessed girl  who took drugs and had already had sex twice.)

* Wayne Compton, 29, Maryland, USA, married 13-year-old after she became pregnant [by him, all presume]. (McDNL 10 xi ’98)

Michael Kennedy, 39, the son of assassinated attorney-general Robert Kennedy: KENNEDY 'AFFAIR WITH A GIRL, 14' ('Guardian', 9 vii)

TgF NewsLetter, 1997:

Paedophilia Worries Corner

KENNEDY 'AFFAIR WITH A GIRL, 14'

Such was the headline in 'The Sun' (26 iv) over a story that one of JFK's nephews, Michael Kennedy, began sleeping with his own family baby-sitter when she was 14 and he 35. "They had a four-year affair—ending last summer when the girl told her parents. The dad-of-three was once caught in bed with [the teenager] by wife Victoria. He blamed booze and went to a rehab clinic. But he continued seeing the girl on his release. Michael and Victoria split last week."

    This is disconcerting news for lovers of the American Royal Family—troubled as they have been lately by revelations of Catholic JFK's unhesitating procurement of abortions for some of his hundreds of bedtime partners. But two reassurances can be offered. (1) Paedophilia, to psychiatrists, is an attraction to pre-pubescent youngsters, hardly ever older than 13. (2) A friend of the teenager has made it quite clear that the affair was simply an ordinary love affair—albeit the teenager's first. It is only the ignoramuses of the child abuse industry and their moronic followers who would call this 'child sex abuse' 'child molestation' or 'paedophilia'; and only feminazies and American lawyers who would in such a case proceed to demand colossal damages for 'rape', 'mental rape', 'sexual harassment', 'patriarchy' etc.

Justin Fashanu, top British Black footballer, suicided. Once found bedded with boy ‘not a day over 15.’ (Independent, Guardian, Times and Sun, 4 v '98)

Vicki McIntosh, 27, Falkirk, had committed acts of "shameless indecency" with one of the fifteen-year-old boys in her charge. Scotsman 17 iv ’98.

Father Brendan Smyth (He was the paedophile priest whose case in 1997 brought down the E'irish government (which had attempted a cover-up on behalf of the Church). He was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment in Dublin for 74 child abuse charges dating back to 1959. He soon died in prison.)

Father Rudy Cos, Dallas, TX (Independent, 2 viii '97, Andrew Brown)

Father Eric Taylor, 78, Warwickshire, convicted for ‘oral sex and other sex acts’ c. 1960. Boys were paid. (Scotsman, 16 iv '98, Damien Pearse)

Father Ivor Payne, a 54-year-old Catholic priest was sentenced by Dublin Criminal Court to a six-year jail term for some form of 'child molesting.' (Times, 24 vi '98)

Bachelor Peter Hamilton-Harvey offers shelter at his 36-room rundown seaside mansion in Bournemouth. A convicted child molester, he was once jailed briefly for sexually 'assaulting' two boys on a garden camping (Mirror, 20 iii '98).

Hull Labour Party councillor named ‘paedophile’ in Chamber (Mail, 12 iii '98)

Glasgow Celtic FC coach? (On trial Glasgow, xi ’98)

Graham Rix, 41, Assistant Manager of Chelsea FC (McDNL 17 xi ’98).

In Queensland of 1997, Pretty Natasha Ryan began an affair with 22-year-old milkman Scott Black when she was thirteen. After reprimands from police the couple went in to happy hiding for five years, only telephoning to tell what they had done as the police brought a man to court for Natasha’s presumed murder. Acting on a tip, police finally arrested them but as soon as Natasha was home, now age 19, she promptly returned to her boyfriend. The usual authorities claimed (without a shred of evidence) that Natasha must have been a victim of the ‘Stockholm Syndrom’ (in which victims find it impossible to escape from their captors). (Times, 19 iv 2003, p. 25)

In 2003, after a year of romantic and sexy internet correspondence, a British 12-year-old girl from Wigan who had posed as 19, agreed to meet militarily decorated American ex-marine and Bible scholar Toby Studabaker, 31, to have sexual intercourse with him directly and to elope with him to Germany. Lyingly assured by police of a warm welcome in Wigan, volunteered to return – only for Studebaker (who had lost his wife to cancer and never previously been convicted) to find himself awarded a savage four-and-a-half-year jail sentence (BBC, 2 iv 04). (See also http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/index3c.htm, FIND Wigan.)

 

 

Danish Pedophile Association, P.O.Box 843, 2400 Copenhagen

 

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For men of the past and today who have partners/wives substantially younger than themselves, see McDNLs, ‘Babe Baggers’ -- passim, e.g. 19 v ’98; or 16 ii '99 for a resumé. More recently noticed cases are as follows.

 

1841 William Whewell, 50, the new Master of Trinity College Cambridge courted (apparently successfully) the wealthy Ullswater beauty, Cordelia Marshall, 20.  (Recorded in Nicholas Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton, Oxford University Press, 2001.)

 

1948 (ClassicFM, 10 iii 02, 23:40) Composer William Walton, 46, impetuously proposed to and quickly married an Argentinian beauty, Suzanna Gilpaso {?}, 22, who remained his wife for life despite Walton's refusing to let her have a baby and despite infidelities. Walton's opening gambit was 'Do you know I am going to marry you?' After two weeks, Walton told Suzanna that if she didn't marry him he would return to London and marry the first girl he met on the street. The ruse worked. Suzanna later said 'Walton was always so funny, and he always got whatever he wanted.'

 

1953 Star-in-the-making Audrey Hepburn, 24, meets actor/director husband-to-be Mel Ferrer, 37. In her films of that time, Audrey, looking 16, was often paired with much older male leads such as Humphrey Bogart, 55, and Gary Cooper, 56. One film critic wrote of 'Sabrina', "Every time Bogie pitches the woo, you feel like calling the cops." (B.Paris, Audrey Hepburn, pback p.111) Commenting on Cooper's age in 1956, Audrey Hepburn said of criticism of her men being too old: "The charge is particularly unfair to Coop. In 'Love in the Afternoon' he's not trying to fool anyone. He's supposed to be a man of fifty. As for Fred Astaire {also 56 during 'Funny Face'}, who cares how old he is. He's Fred Astaire! If anyone doesn't like it, he can go jump in the lake."

 

Mrs Margaret Thatcher was ten years younger than her husband, Denis Thatcher.
 
v 01  Rupert Murdoch, 70, and his new Asian wife Wendy Deng, 33, announced a pregnancy.

v 01  Multi-millionaire disc jockey Chris Evans, 35, appeared at court (accused of a speeding at 100mph) along with his wife Billie Piper, a popstar and reporter, 18. Evans was soon sacked from his TV job for naughtiness and indiscipline.

Max Ernst seems (from TV pictures) to have taken a perhaps 30-year-old lover when he was himself 65+. Later: Shiou's 'book of artistic couples, has a picture of the pair. The girl was the delightful Leonora Carrington. Another artistic pair with a big age differences was that of Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel.

Libidinous Wrinkly rocker Mick Jagger, c. 60, has in tow Sophie Dahl, c. 24. {Though challenged by Lord Fredrick Windsor (Magdalene College, Oxford), 22 – Sun.Telegraph, 11 xi 01, p. 42, 'Sophie's