Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (27 page)

I suspect that someday in the not-too-distant future—your grandchildren may even live long enough to see it—the field of cognitive neuroscience will have advanced to the stage that a person’s entire erotic profile (whatever appears behind the windows of the sex slot machine spin) will be accessible by a quick brain scan, perhaps without him or her even knowing it’s been done (think airport security). Until those rather invasive days are here, we’re unlikely to get any meaningful erotic age orientation statistics. Yet we certainly do know the way that basic evolutionary biology works, and while it doesn’t tell us much about the number of true pedophiles or true gerontophiles there are in the world, except to say that both are probably fairly rare, we
can
safely infer from this theoretical knowledge that there are far more men out there who are attracted to legally underage minors than most of us would like to believe.

*   *   *

The tension between “socially appropriate” age-related attraction and the “biologically adaptive” male response to youth has gotten quite messy, to say the least. Our society is riddled with contradictions. It’s generally inadvisable if you’re running for mayor in your small town, for instance, but in Canada and several U.S. states one is perfectly free to debauch a consenting sixteen-year-old from dusk till dawn without fear of police interruption, since that’s the legal age where you live. Take a single naked photograph of your sex partner, though, and it’s grounds for a federal sentence, since child pornography is defined at the national level as anyone under the age of eighteen.

We’ve become so uncomfortable about men’s
possible
attraction to children that we’ve even started outlawing an aesthetic appreciation for the beauty of youth. In 2008, for example, the famed photographer Annie Leibovitz was commissioned by
Vanity Fair
to do a photo shoot of the Disney Channel’s then fifteen-year-old starlet, Miley Cyrus. Some parents whose young children were fans of the teenager’s Disney alter ego, Hannah Montana, were outraged by Leibovitz’s shots: Cyrus was shown on newsstands across the world wearing smudged red lipstick, her long hair damp and tousled, with the length of her bare back to the viewer. She was clutching a satin sheet to cover her front, so it wasn’t a topless image, but many nonetheless saw it as “suggestive.” (My gay eyes just saw what her dad Billy Ray’s “Achy Breaky Heart” had led to in 1992, hunched over and staring at me, but that’s neither here nor there.) Online commentators called Leibovitz a “pedophile” and complained about the “sexualization of children” (incidentally, lascivious adults are hardly needed to turn a reproductively mature fifteen-year-old girl into a sexual entity; she’s quite capable of doing that on her own), while Disney Channel representatives castigated the photographer and the
Vanity Fair
editors for “deliberately manipulat[ing] a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines.” (This, you’ll note, is a quote from the spokeswoman of a company that had built a billion-dollar franchise around that very same fifteen-year-old girl.) “I’m sorry that my portrait of Miley has been misinterpreted,” Leibovitz responded to all the negative attention, clarifying that she’d discussed the shoot at length with a very agreeable Cyrus beforehand. “The photograph is a simple, classic portrait, shot with very little makeup, and I think it is very beautiful.”

Another cultural icon to be skewered as a female “pedophile” is Germaine Greer. Her famous book,
The Female Eunuch
, has long been celebrated as a pivotal text in the feminist movement of the early 1970s. But it was her 2003 book,
The Beautiful Boy
, that caused the real ruckus. Essentially,
The Beautiful Boy
is a visual meandering along our undeniable history of eroticizing male pubescents in art (not many of Greer’s critics were aware of the difference between pedophiles and hebephiles, needless to say). Featuring on its cover a photograph of the young actor Björn Andrésen taken during the 1971 film adaptation of
Death in Venice
(Andrésen had played the role of fourteen-year-old Tadzio, the beautiful Polish boy with whom the older male protagonist in Thomas Mann’s classic novella becomes mortally infatuated), Greer’s book showcases pretty boys frozen in creative amber, with artists like Caravaggio and Donatello immortalizing the je ne sais quoi of their youth before it slipped forever into the bloated or overly muscled bodies of piliferous men.
*
Greer describes her book as “full of pictures of ravishing pre-adult boys with hairless chests, wide-apart legs and slim waists.”

Rather surprising to many, she’d actually written the book for women. In an editorial for London’s
Daily Telegraph
, Greer clarified, “I know that the only people who are supposed to like looking at pictures of boys are a sub-group of gay men. Well, I’d like to reclaim for women the right to appreciate the short-lived beauty of boys, real boys, not simpering 30-year-olds with shaved chests.” Despite her intentions,
The Beautiful Boy
indeed sold almost exclusively to that very subgroup of gay men—a glimpse, perhaps, into the relative scarcity not only of female pedophiles but female hebephiles as well. When I asked a friend in her thirties if she could ever see herself getting turned on by a young pubescent male, I believe her response was something along the lines of “Have you ever
smelled
a fourteen-year-old boy’s sneakers?” Clearly not a hebephilic podophile, that one.

In Greer’s hometown of Sydney, New South Wales, a scandal erupted in 2008 when police raided the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington and seized more than a dozen figurative works by the acclaimed photographer Bill Henson. Henson has for decades been considered a national treasure by the creative class of Australia, his images gracing the walls of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the Venice Biennale. He’s made a career of focusing his camera lens on wistful adolescent subjects. In advance of the artist’s Sydney exhibition, the gallery had sent out an electronic invitation to the New South Wales haut monde that included one of his new portraits of a naked thirteen-year-old girl. That image made its way to Hetty Johnston of the Bravehearts foundation, an Australian child advocacy group. A raid on the Roslyn Oxley9 was triggered when Johnston and other concerned members of the public lodged complaints with the police, in their view tipping off the authorities that the gallery was slated to feature a collection of child porn. After much ado, all charges against Henson and the gallery owners were dropped, but the incident resulted in a controversial revision to New South Wales child pornography laws that effectively removed “artistic purposes” from special exemption in the production of images of nude minors. The Henson affair sharply divided the Australian public, with enduring concerns over government censorship colliding headfirst with the pedophilia panic of the current age. Australia’s prime minister at the time, Kevin Rudd, declared Henson’s work “absolutely revolting” and of “no artistic merit.” Art critics in turn rebuked Rudd as a philistine who was in no way qualified to offer such a critique. The gallery owners received credible threats that their building would be set ablaze. And the unflappable artist, for his part, was quoted a few years later as saying that the whole episode was “at best inconvenient.”

To me, there’s just something so very sad about this point we’ve come to: it’s the point where a youthful nude in an art gallery no longer is seen as a thing of beauty but is instead only a tawdry broken mirror distorting our own terrifying desires. Children should be fiercely guarded and kept close to the breast of any civilized society. But in adopting a patently false but stubbornly clung-to mythology of human sexuality that makes demons out of natural drives, we’ve entered a stage of moral sickness, not of moral health. The good news is that it’s just a stage, not a terminal illness. And as we’ve seen quite clearly throughout, when it comes to sex, we human beings are a work in progress.

SEVEN

LIFE LESSONS FOR THE LEWD AND LASCIVIOUS

Indeed, of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.

—Yukio Mishima,
Confessions of a Mask
(1949)

Modern cruise ships are floating metropolises with enough activities to keep a twenty-first-century kid with a Red Bull addiction and attention deficit disorder busy forever. But in the first half of the seventeenth century, when a motley crew of British expatriates outgrew their welcome with the Church of England and decided to colonize America, being an émigré on one of those more austere, rat-infested transport vessels—and stuck with a bunch of Puritans for fellow travelers, no less—was dreadfully dull. Imagine what it must have been like as a teenage boy aboard the
Talbot
, for instance, which set sail from the Isle of Wight in March 1629 bound for the newly founded Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (This was long before the witches arrived, so aside from rumors of folks having sex with pigs, which was nothing new, really, it was still the promised land over there.) As an adolescent male, you’re basically an ambulant sperm factory with an incompetent foreman, but somehow or another you’ll have to get through months on this leaky, oversize bathtub with only psalms and daily gum checks for scurvy to pass the time and keep you from sinning. And that’s easier said than done.

We know from the records that there were at least five such boys in the belly of the
Talbot
on that journey to the New World, because they’re the main players in a landmark event in early American history. It’s not a tale you’ll find in any public-school textbook, but it belongs in there every bit as much as that of Pocahontas and John Smith (and there’s probably more truth to it, too). When the
Talbot
finally arrived along with the rest of the “Higginson Fleet” on the banks of Salem the morning of June 19, the most urgent order of business for the fleet master, the Reverend Francis Higginson, was to deal with these “five beastly Sodomiticall boyes [who’d] confessed their wickedness not to be named” while aboard the ship. They weren’t the first seafarers to while away the long hours this way, nor, certainly, would they be the last British schoolboys to do so, but these lustful teenagers
were
the first recorded sodomites ever to set foot on what would eventually be U.S. soil. (That’s only the written history, of course. There’s no doubt some randy Native Americans beat them to the homosexual punch eons before.) Their feet wouldn’t be planted on this side of the Atlantic for long, however. The details of how it all came to light aren’t clear, but we do know that once the Massachusetts authorities learned of the boys’ gay orgies aboard the
Talbot
, they were so horrified that they shoved the teens right back onto the ship and returned them to England, along with a message to King Charles that since the unmentionable crimes occurred on the high seas,
technically
these “beastly” lads should be dealt with at their point of origin.

I was born some 345 years, 10 months, and 17 days after the
Talbot
first came ashore at Salem, just a few hundred miles south in Nowhere, New Jersey. It’s not entirely clear if I was literally born gay—it’s not as if any of us are rushed into neonatal plethysmography straight out of our moms’ vaginas—but whether I was queer from conception or arrived with a brain genetically predisposed to getting stamped with an irrevocable orientation to penises during my first few years in America, our country’s initial planks of religious scaffolding had by then grown into a fortress of self-righteousness. Many Europeans like to point out that Americans have a “complex” about sex, but remember, if you go back far enough, we’re European. It’s just that our earliest settlers were among Europe’s biggest prudes. Fortunately, the antigay sermons had eased up
slightly
by 1975. Yet in many ways, I slipped out of fetal solitude that year and into a society playing the same old broken record of thou-shalt-nots that Higginson and company had imported from an overly ecclesiastical Britain in 1629. After all, they might have sent that first wave of sodomites back to England, but the Puritans already setting up shop in the colonies carried all the necessary ingredients for deviant sexuality. And that was enough to keep the pitchforks sharp and the stakes burning for at least four centuries to come.

*   *   *

America has long had its issues with sex, but few modern countries haven’t. One doesn’t typically think of “gay Paris” in the 1920s, for example, as being a hotbed of oppression for homosexuals. And it wasn’t, if by that you mean the sort of blind hatred toward gays and lesbians seen in other parts of the world (Uganda comes to mind today, with its backward “Kill the Gays” bill on the table recently). But even in cosmopolitan Paris, homosexuals were specimens before they were human beings. If you were a gay man looking for a state-of-the-art solution to your “condition” of sexual inversion, then Paris in the early twentieth century was the place to be. There you’d find doctors singing the praises of a promising new experimental treatment in which your testicles would be replaced with those from the cadaver of a hypersexual straight man. It didn’t work, by the way, and the straight French convicts implanted with their recycled testicles didn’t turn flamboyantly gay either. Luckily, however, they all got human gonads. Over in Spain around this same time, a few renegade doctors were busy grafting monkey testicles onto their gay male patients.
*
Even more bizarre, they were grafting just a solitary monkey testicle somewhere on the man’s body. Rather curiously, the records don’t say where on his body it went, exactly. “What in the world is
that
?” I can imagine one of these men hearing while undressing before a new boyfriend years later. “This lump on my back? Oh, it’s nothing really, just one of those monkey balls from when I was young and stupid.”

We now know that these physicians who viewed homosexuality as an endocrine problem were barking up the wrong tree. But at least their approach shows a shift toward scientific thinking about gays and lesbians. That thinking was pretty shaky and obviously inhumane, but nonetheless it was probably an improvement on the long-standing superstition and fear hovering over the subject of sodomites. Not everyone, of course, embraced rationalism; even today, many of us are stuck in the puritanical mud of 1629. But the opportunity to pull oneself out of the residue of such fire-and-brimstone reasoning is available to anyone wishing to reach out and grab hold of the best science of the day. Science won’t tell you what’s moral and what’s not. But by standing up on your own two feet on the terra firma of reality instead of remaining up to your eyeballs in the swamp of dogma, you’ll get a much better lay of the land for navigating the moral landscape. And if you head one day in the wrong emotional direction, you’ll know that more than likely, it’s just the gunk from an overly religious past clogging the inner workings of your moral compass, steering you away from “against what is right.”