User:Didaskalosmrm

Hello, NewGon.

Been at BoyChat since 1999. Have a Ph.D. in trollology from Encyclopedia Dramatica. Mostly focused on high-end classical scholarship & performance, but also thoroughly enjoy the low-brow world of internet baby-talk, memes, LulzCon, trolling and all. Very keen on the upcoming identity battles, which I dub: 1 hash-tag PedoSchwing2025 if conservative opposition collapses quietly, or 2 hash-tag PedoFloyd if it doesn't, and somebody from Team BL plays the fool and gets martyred.

I tend to speak polyphonically, so Plato's dialogues are a natural way for me to express myself. The Phaedros, for instance, allows me to cover the self-centered, ridiculous, lustful, mercenary, hypocritical side of BL, as I have come to know it in 23 years of participating at BoyChat (up to and including murder), as well as going full-on High Boy-Lover Priesthood, dropping the anti-pedo bombs of: PLATO, FICINO, PLATONIC LOVE, and CELIBACY. In addition, I'm deeply interested in the Eumolpos Castastrophe, the abrupt transition between those two points of view. Lotta laughs in the Eumolpos Catastrophe.

I thoroughly enjoy travelling the world doing performance that lets me show my ULTRA-VIOLENT face (Achilles, Beowulf) and my LUPUS/HAIRY-FACE/Praedator Corporis/Carnivorous Pedophile face. (Satyricon, Pergamene Boy, Phaedros, Zeus/Ganymede, Cretan Abduction myth in Plutarch, etc.) I can do this (and you can't) because I've professionalized as a reciter of Greek and Latin poetry (and you haven't.)

I'm out as a BL IRL, as only a Classical Scholar who voices BL literature really can be, and hope to do convention work representing the BL POV in the current climate of gender-chaos. I'm particularly interested in talking to people who think trans has gone too far. Addressing alarmed conservatives: If you're serious about "saving" boys from trans, from the consequences of having ONLY female role-models, then you're going to need to start talking seriously about the natural currents of libido between men & boys, as such relationships are essential for boys who are trying to become men. What can be done to help boys and boy-lovers initiatate, maintain, regulate, and evaluate such relationships, and, when they have run their course, bring such relationships to an end? Are we to limit ourselves to the old Boy Scouts of America model, of boys meeting briefly with elderly, sexually-trustworthy merit-badge counselors? Are we to throw the doors wide open to boys having sex with whomever they want, whenever they want? Both positions seem a little extreme to me. I don't know what the emancipation protocols described here would entail, exactly, but I think the discussion has to move in the direction of hearing from the boys themselves.

As a veteran of 3 separate year-long post-gay programs (they weren't that bad!) I feel strongly that the discussion has to simultaneously cover the personalest of the personal matters, AND ALSO that the discussions must be carried out in a way that is totally impersonal and embarrasses nobody, because it avoids bringing personal matters into the open. Discussions about the gender-identity formation that takes place in the context of a man-boy relationship must be framed by the realities that a boy necessarily comes from his mother, and will end up in a heterosexual relationship. (Well, most of them.) A boy-love that doesn't understand itself as nothing more than a TRANSITIONAL MOMENT between those two relationships, is a foolish boy-love.

(See OPUS GENERIS as a first go at answering those demands, in the context of a two-hour performance piece, and within the limitations of Greek/Latin poetry.)

As far as my pro-c bonafides, I give full-voiced, lusty representation to the pro-contact Greek voices, and the Greek voices that oppose them. I think that should be enough for anybody. In particular, Warren's Defense of Uranian Love, Volume I, gives a good, Dantescan account of Boy-Love Excessive, Defective, and Perverted, if that's the kind of thing you want to read about. Warren's aim, I think, was to MAKE people look at the Warren Cup, and MAKE people read the Phaedros. Rampant pedophilia, and pedophilia subject to brutal and effective restraint are, for me, two sides of the same coin; not to be separated.

I would prefer to remain focused on Heroic Poetry, as I think that's the sort of thing that the kind of boys I like, would like. But I have been distracted the last few years with the Phaedros and OPUS GENERIS. My eventual career goal is to have all Homer & all Plato edited up in nice four-language editions (Greek, Latin, English and Japanese) and recorded in all four languages, and housed on a nice, permanent, professional-looking, internationally-accessible Digital Classics Platform. My presence here at NewGon is a way of beginning that uploading process in a Digital Context not unfriendly to Boy-Love. I'm almost done with the Four-Language Iliad; in order to avoid copyright issues with the Japanese publisher, I'll have to muddle 3 20th C translations with some cutting edge 2020's Tokyo slang, and call it a "new translation." (!)

Having worked on the translations for the republication of Edward Perry Warren's A Defense of Uranian Love, (2009) I got interested in the Phaedros, which DUL cites extensively, and which I'm almost ready to record, with its famous 3 myths and 3 speeches. Plato takes his Socrates-character down some VERY queer streets, in the process. As with everything I do, my edition is a Four Language edition, Greek, Ficino's Latin, English, and Japanese.

In 2015, seeing the interest in Trans with Bruce Jenner's transformation into Caitlyn, I resolved to stitch together a miniature epic of gender-identity formation, which I call OPUS GENERIS, begining with the boy's stage of Identity with the Mother, (Cat 63, Cybele & Attis) and ending with the boy chasing girls his own age like a proper heterosexual. (Ovid Metamorphoses, Apollo and Cyparissus, ceding to Daphne & Apollo.) In between, of course, I put the poetry of boy-love relationships which fail because the father-figure is too close (Pindar Olympian #1, Zeus on Ganymede, Poseidon on Pelops) or too far away (Odyssey II, Telemachos missing Odysseus.) All the poems are meant to be representations of nightmarish situations which a boy must learn to recognize and wake up from. Not as bases to be tagged, or badges to be earned. THAT would be a mis-interpretation!

My conception of proper Boy-Love is very much a matter of the Ever-Receding Low-Competence Dance. Most men prize their high-competence reputations; Jordan Peterson has beaten this theme to death. Boys, of course, have little competence at anything, so if you don't want to intimidate them, you have to sort of do a little dance of being a little less competent and a little more competent than they are, at the task in question. And, when they have a laugh at the little bit of incompetence and are inspired by the little bit of competence, and make a little advance towards the boy-lover, the boy-lover has to do a little hop, skip & jump, to recede out of the boy's grasp, but not out of his view. Not out his view, but out of his grasp, if the game is to be kept going. If it's ever a question of the boy EMBRACING the boy-lover, then the relationship has deteriorated to a mother/child or sex-maniac/sex-object relationship, which is not my idea of good Boy-Love at all. SO: ever-receding, and with a little more and a little less competence than the boy. OPUS GENERIS and PHAEDROS are to be understood as my attempt to communicate what I have learned about BL within the strictures of classical form, perpetually enacting the slightly less competent and slightly more competent boy-lover dance, for the amusement and edification of my fellow BL's. ;)

As far as the ethnonationalism question, if you took the ethnonationalism out of heroic poetry, there would be very little left. Of course, as a Welsh-American, it's with OODLES OF IRONY that I recite something as Anglo-Saxon as TEH BEOWULF. Boys must have their spirituality and their tribe. What else do boys have their muscles and sexuality and dreams of independence for, if not for their tribe? Studying heroic poetry shows how men and boys of older times made space for themselves. As a keen student of Richmond, Virginia's dear son James Branch Cabell -- nothing UNIRONIC about him or me! -- I am quite taken by the recent melting down of the Charlottesville statue of General Robert E. Lee. The more the 21st Century melts down the old masculine ideals, the more (I suppose) boys will be LOOKING AROUND for masculine ideals they can embrace for their own 21st century lives. I'm stock-piling heroic poetry against the time when the public forum is completely feminized, and no one but us boy-lovers has anything masculine to offer boys.

---Didaskalos, a Good Latin Teacher Gone Bad. (My Performance Alter Ego) ---Mark Miner, In Real Life.

Links to stuff I've done

Account of poetry activities https://www.facebook.com/SanDiegoHomerCon/ Patchy Fur writes about me https://dogpatch.press/2023/03/ Virtue-Cast #5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ6J5wFtzJY&fbclid=IwAR2uQohdTccSHbMMxAJAlwpbRtocwm23iu1KTr2acTPeYm-K_JLGfPY9HnU Reader article: https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2019/jul/31/golden-mark-miner-celebrates-gender-fluidity/ Warren's Collection comes to the Getty in California https://chasingaphrodite.com/tag/mark-miner/ Warren's Defense of Uranian Love https://www.amazon.com/Defence-Uranian-Love-Valancourt-Classics/dp/193455569X Biblia Americana (I helped with the volume on JOHN, which is still sub prelo.) https://heritagebooks.org/products/biblia-americana-vol-1-genesis-mather.html