Essay:Our Sexuality, Ourselves (Review of The Age Taboo in Gay Community News)
Book Review from Gay Community News, November 1981, Page 3, Vol. 09, No. 17. Also available elsewhere,[1] this page is our backup.
OUR SEXUALITY, OURSELVES
POWER AND EMPOWERMENT
Nov 1981 ◆ Cindy Patton
The Age Taboo: Gay Male, Sexuality, Power and Consent ed. by Daniel Tsang (Alyson Publications: Boston, 1981), 178 pp., indexed, $3.93.
Reviewed by Cindy Patton
When I set out to write this review, I had no idea of the number of related issues that would appear along the way. I chose to discuss man/boy love because I felt it was an issue that was needlessly dividing people and because I believed the great interest in the subject grew out of a sincere desire to understand all of the ramifications of sexuality. I soon realized that we have no good vocabulary for discussing sexuality and that we want an answer, now. I found that I had to limit my discussion to what I saw as the important question for the gay and lesbian and feminist movements at this time — sexuality and power. I personally feel that the differences between men’s and women’s sexuality, and lesbian/gay and hetero sexuality pose such important questions about socialization, repression, and power that relationships between men and girls should be treated separately. The purpose of this book and this review is to discuss the nature of man/ boy love and how it fits into the current political climate.
The topic of man/boy love has come under scrutiny recently by feminists, pro-feminist leftist men, the Christian right, politicized m/bl supporters, and the men and boys themselves. The images tossed around range from huge cocks descending viciously on unsuspecting adolescent anuses, to kindly bespectacled men cuddling tousled-haired boys in front of a tv (that’s television). I’m tempted to say “and somewhere in between lies the truth.” But that would be a further lie, and one which neatly duplicates the logic which has distorted the discussion of sexuality for our whole lives. Sexual practices and feelings are not monolithic, diametrically opposed, or cast on a continuum. The meaning of particular acts becomes hopelessly obscured in the broader landscape of “sexuality,” that black hole of our feelings, fantasies, and desires that we are only beginning to explore. The dynamic between individuals in a particular relationship is only part of a complex web of relationships; power exists relative to other powers, including social, historical, psychological, and physical power.
Unlike other discussions that have been cast into the political arena, we cannot escape the fact that discussing someone else’s sexuality requires exposing some of our own. It is important to understand the restrictions and hurt we have put on ourselves by striving to define a “correct” sexuality and sexual practice that gets rid of the pain we have all experienced in this culture. It is essential to remember, as we embark on our pointyheaded discussions of sexuality, that we are talking about real human beings, right now. Wishing that we could be free from sexual expressions and attitudes that we inherited from our culture will not make our troublesome sexuality go away. We can legitimately discuss the quality of our relationships in order to combat the “isms” we have identified as wrong in our analysis. But we must keep foremost in our minds that our very sexuality has been shaped by the society we have taken it upon ourselves to criticize. We do not leave our political meetings and go to bed (or to the bushes, or johns, or wherever) to a world that is magically free from the dynamics of class, color, age, power, etc. Having discussed some of the problems of understanding sexuality, I want to focus on man/boy love. But because I believe this discussion is only a part of a larger, essential discussion of sexuality, I will return to these problems again.
The Age Taboo: Gay Male Sexuality, Power and Consent, represents an excellent collection of view-points. We hear from m/bl practitioners and apologists; feminists who range from perplexed, to critical, to opposed; socialist leftists who are trying to cast the whole issue into a materialistic context; and most importantly, the boys (and in one case an “anonymous militant young dyke”). What the collection lacks is a good feminist analysis that critically incorporates the radical new ideas of sexuality. Tsang also fails to adequately place the various arguments in the broader context of sexual politics. The book as a whole, while informative, is very somber and lifeless. The only time we get a sense of the joy of these relationships is in the interviews with the boys. It is a shame that all of the discussions of man/ boy love are serious and project a sense that we are embarking on dangerous territory — it becomes all too easy to overlook the simple fact that these men and boys are enjoying each other’s company. We are provided with a body of material that explores man/boy love in a political context, which will, hopefully, move the debate past the level of vitriolic attack and blind defense, and on to a level where the real issues may be sorted out.
Included in this volume is a statement of philosophy from Youth Liberation in New York, who believe that “children should have the right to control their own bodies,” and are “immediately suspicious of anyone who claims to protect children by restricting their rights (including their “right” to be a prostitute or to have sex with an adult).” They acknowledge an inherent potential for abuse in sexual relationships between adults and children, but offer that “the only effective way to avoid abuse is to educate adults to be sensitive to the needs and desires of children and lessen the general level of sexual repression in the society.”
Members of the Gay Left Collective push this analysis further by examining the historical “category” called childhood. They suggest (along with many others who have written on the subject of childhood) that our notion of childhood innocence arises roughly in the 18th century and at the same time that the economic and social structure was intensifying the definition of women as wives and mothers. Child labor laws and the mysterious and ever increasing “need” for extended years of education served to reinforce the power of the capitalist society that these phenomenon served and enhance the notion of childhood innocence and a-sexuality. Jamie Gough of the GLC concludes from this analysis that it is these social constructions of reality (i.e., the myths of innocence and the helplessness and a-sexualness of children) that oppress children, not adult /child relationships, per se.
The book examines consent primarily in terms of the age of consent laws, the extent to which they are differentially enforced (gay men are arrested for sex with boys far out of proportion to hetero men's arrests for sex with girls), and the malleability of the actual age of consent (in the Puritan America, the age of consent for girls was 10, there was no age of consent for boys). While changing the age of consent laws is probably essential for the ultimate liberation of children, focusing on this issue obscures the real issue of power.
A good, informed analysis of power in our relationships with each other and society is essential to any movement for social change. A lot of time and energy is spent discussing who has power over whom in sexual relationships with little attention to kinds of power and networks of power. Many of us assume that because men are bigger, richer, and more socially mobile than boys that they have power over them. This is an insult to the intelligence and ability of boys as well as a diversion from the fact that these men are often using their social power to liberate boys from oppressive homes that stifle their sexual expression. Time and again, men have expressed fondness and appreciation for the men who helped them express their gayness when they were boys and their only ,other frame of reference was their homophobic parents. Women, too, almost invariably point to a gym teacher, youth group leader, or older female relative upon whom they attached their lesbian fantasies, and, in some cases, with whom they actually developed sexual relationships. It is the power of gay adults to give support (and sometimes sex) to gay youths that gets the Moral Majority up in arms. To them, there is no difference between an avowed boy lover, and a gay teacher. While I do not want to deny that adults have social, psychological, and, in some cases, physical power (especially in the case of parents, whose beating of their children has only recently been considered assault), but, based on my discussions with a number of gay men, I do not think that boy lovers often abuse that power. The real abuse goes on in the family, an institution that some feminists who criticize boy lovers conveniently forget is intrinsically under attack in their own analysis.
In discussing man/boy love with several patient friends, one man related to me his experience as a boy. He was quite shaken (still) by the extent to which he had destroyed a man’s life by “telling on him,”and the guilt from this experience is the enduring emotion — not the joy, or wonder, or excitement at discovering the nature of his sexuality. He had “told on” the man he was becoming involved with because the man had wanted more than the boy was ready to give. Frightened of confronting the man, and raised to obey adults, the boy spent weeks worrying, then finally told his parents. What became clear, and troubling, to me was not that the man had such a great potential for setting the schedule of intimacy with the boy, but the fact that the boy’s only recourse was to turn to an even more authoritarian power — his parents — in order to sort out what he wanted to do. The boy had no power; the adults settled the whole situation. Power is a double-edged sword, it gives and takes with one swipe. But society, and the great weight of its mores, has far more power than any individual, especially any individual who is conducting his/her sexual life outside of the prescribed arena.
When we discuss power in any relationship, we must accept the reality that people always have differing levels of different kinds of power. Feminists have tended to accept the definitions of power as society gives them, i.e., any thing men have is powerful. Actually, there are many kinds of power that are not valued by society, and which we, therefore, tend not to think about or exercise. The myth of power is that some have “it” and everyone else is powerless. Society use that myth to keep us from fighting back We need to challenge that myth by empowering people, creating alternatives that help them use the power they have — women and kids can leave home, if we give them the support and somewhere to go; we can fight back against people who attack us on the street, if we will learn how to fight and organize safety patrols; people will leave unfair or unworkable relationships, if we give them social options and break-down the sanctity of “coupling."
On an individual level, to say that the man has the power over the boy, or the “top” has the power over the “bottom,” or the upper class person has the power over the poor person, does not do justice to the positive sharing of power that is often a part of these relationships. In relationships where two people start out “equal,” there is probably less of the learning and discovery of a whole different view of the world that takes place in relationships between people who are substantially different. Why should we think of man/boy lovers any differently?
It is clear (just becaue Freud said it, that doesn’t make it a lie) that our sexuality begins developing early and has the potential to be expressed in an enormous number of forms. But it is society (as a cursory look at cross-cultural studies will show) that defines the meaning of sexual practice and streamlines sexual development to fit into boxes that support social needs. One might justifiably ask whether capitalist society represses adolescent sexuality precisely because it is this sexuality that is most likely to be diverse in its object and unassuming about the “morality” of what they are doing. It is, then, by being told what we ought not to do that we finally arrive at the narrow space of what we should or can do. Adults that do anything else reap psychic penalties, or if caught, imprisonment.
Specific sexual practices serve different social functions — butt-fucking, for example, serves as an initiation rite in some cultures; as a means of controlling prisoners in others (our own for example); and as mere sexual enjoyment in others. One must ask first, what group of people are we talking about, what do they do, and what does it mean for them? As I tried to write this article, I became aware of my own need to know what it is men and boys do together. I was troubled, because I dismiss that question as stupid when it is asked of me, as a lesbian. But at the same time, I felt that my ideas of what this type of relationship might consist of had come either from the straight press or from NAMBLA statements.
Finally, I just marched up to some people and proposed the question. What I got in reply is what I have also responded to the same question when it was directed at me — lots of very different things. There are probably very few men who would even suggest anality to a boy; one man I spoke to said a boy would have to convince a man to engage in anal intercourse. Some men merely "wrestle” with boys and engage in little more affectionate expression of their sexual feelings than the average scoutmaster. (Indeed, the many samesex institutions for adult /child relating deserve a hell of a lot more scrutiny than anyone has given them.) Much more common is cocksucking by the men (and this, when you actually read the court cases, is what most men are arrested for, though the media tries to put over very different images). But to analyze the particular acts does little more than break myths, and actually obscures the many other aspects of men’s relationships with boys. In most cases, the men take the boys out into society, to movies, plays, operas in some circles, and generally provide for them a caring relationship. Tom Reeves often discusses his relationships with lower class boys in Baltimore (with no analysis of class save a rather patronizing hint that these wonderful boys are free from cultural inhibitions about sex) but in a way that idealizes these relationships and makes them seem as unreal as those highly- touted, politically correct dyke monogamies.
Fortunately, others who are not so close to the subject of man/boy love have analyzed the political climate that is provoking the current attack on man/boy lovers.
Gayle Rubin has raised questions about giving the state power over sex when “the media and the police betray an incapacity to distinguish between rape and consent, lovers and mobsters, children of five and ‘children’ of seventeen.” The evidence seems strong that the resurgent right (and quite possibly some of the tactically militant feminists who oppose pornography) has resulted in an attack on feminists and lesbians and gays, by way of sex and pornography laws. NOW has come out against “pederasty” and the National Lawyers’ Guild has (in carefully worded language that is, I think, actually much more supportive than some have claimed) more or less absolved themselves of responsibility for defending man/boy lovers.
A great deal of debate has centered around how we as a movement (actually several movements — socialist, gay, women’s) are going to respond to the attack on man/boy lovers and the phantasmagoric “kiddie porn’ industry. The lesbian and gay movements (and I hope the others will develop parallel analysis) cannot abandon people with non-“vanilla” sexual expressions. To the resurgent right, boy lovers are no different than the rest of us — we all “recruit” — and our crime is simply being queer. It is absolutely essential to be clear that when the state cracks down on kiddy porn, boy lovers,
s/m folks, etc., that they are not attacking special brands of deviant sexuality — they are attacking nonreproductive sex in toto. They are smart enough to know that they have to pick us off one at a time; we have to be smart enough to realize that homosexuality — in a business suit, or not — will never be respectable or acceptable to the vast majority of people as they live and think today.
When I started writing the review of this book, I imagined that I might write the statement on man/ boy love to date (silly me!). Instead, I find myself wishing more information were available. If we are serious about understanding childhood and adult sexuality, we must talk to men and boys who love each other, honestly remember our own desires as children, and most importantly, talk to the kids. No one seems to want to go to them — are we afraid of their warm, open sexuality? or are we still so ageist that we don’t think they’ll have anything important to say? We might also talk to the men who are in prison for sex with boys and find about about the punishment they suffer — ridicule, rape, “protective” solitary confinement. Repressive society’s views of “criminals” (ie., us) is never so clear as it is in prison.
The issues behind man/ boy love are not, in the end, whether we will support them or not, but rather, can we stand to look closely at our own sexuality. We were once those same children, languishing in our queerness in families that did not want us to be sexual. Can we extend our analysis and demand a child’s right to be free enough to malice informed sexual decisions? Can we get over our own societally induced fear of childhood sexuality? We can make no radical changes in the terms of our adult sexuality until we can free children from the years of pressure to de-sexualize and straight-sexualize them, and this should be the turf for our debate. How we empower people will determine how we deal with power in our relationship to each other and society. Race, class, age, any difference will take on new meaning when the people who have been powerless finally get power. Until then, things ain’t gonna be easy, but we need so desperately to learn from each other, that at least we have to try.