Essay: Pederast, by Angus Stewart - Revision history

Prue at 22:51, 20 June 2025

2025-06-20T22:51:37Z

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	My observations here are general and current: I am not concerned at all with the phenomena of my own adolescence. However, an autobiographical note of sexual development is imperative both as dispelling charges of effeminacy, insanity, etc., as may well arise where few conceptions of homosexuality are accurate, and also in the interest of the truth I am seeking here.		My observations here are general and current: I am not concerned at all with the phenomena of my own adolescence. However, an autobiographical note of sexual development is imperative both as dispelling charges of effeminacy, insanity, etc., as may well arise where few conceptions of homosexuality are accurate, and also in the interest of the truth I am seeking here.

	Yes, I loved a girl when twelve: a wide-eyed child in a yellow dance frock who still wanders in the shadows of my peripheral vision. Before the annual ball when I would see her I scraped my spots with the scalpel I used for making model aircraft. Then, naturally, my sex and my love were as the poles apart. No, I was not seduced at my public school,school, nor (to crying regret) did I have any sexual connection with other boys there. I entertained myself; secretly borrowed certain articles of clothing from younger boys who were pretty. When seventeen I fell in love with a beautiful boy of thirteen. In a second, at a glance, some chemical change took place in my brain that four years were to prove irreparable. The incomparable power and beauty of this love turned inwards: I left school early solely because I was unable to sustain its terror. My passion ran on, and we met many times, whilst, uncannily, he defied puberty till well past sixteen: he accepted only kisses, and then with anger or reluctance. I then learnt of my boy’s having spent a bewildered week-end in a middle-aged man’s bed in London: scream liar if you will, but this had paternal sanction. Mysteriously the shock to myself was delayed until I saw the man in question when, having the guts to kill neither him nor myself, something popped in my head and for some time I became a psychiatric out-patient. Adolescence is only another word for melodrama. No grudge now. ... A rugger injury rejected me for National Service. (For the cartoonist of the homosexual, I am a county sprint champion.) I taught for two years at a prep school. Sense ebbed and flowed fairly secure from the terror of love I never wanted to experience again. One or two beauties of twelve or thereabouts sat (dressed) on my (dressed) knee. Ashamed only of secrecy I drearily changed my underclothes. Such performance sounds callous: it was not. Am now twenty-four, and at what I must describe as 'one of our oldest universities': a youthful but boy-less place.		Yes, I loved a girl when twelve: a wide-eyed child in a yellow dance frock who still wanders in the shadows of my peripheral vision. Before the annual ball when I would see her I scraped my spots with the scalpel I used for making model aircraft. Then, naturally, my sex and my love were as the poles apart. No, I was not seduced at my public school, school,<ref>Bryanston School in Dorset.</ref> nor (to crying regret) did I have any sexual connection with other boys there. I entertained myself; secretly borrowed certain articles of clothing from younger boys who were pretty. When seventeen I fell in love with a beautiful boy of thirteen. In a second, at a glance, some chemical change took place in my brain that four years were to prove irreparable. The incomparable power and beauty of this love turned inwards: I left school early solely because I was unable to sustain its terror. My passion ran on, and we met many times, whilst, uncannily, he defied puberty till well past sixteen: he accepted only kisses, and then with anger or reluctance. I then learnt of my boy’s having spent a bewildered week-end in a middle-aged man’s bed in London: scream liar if you will, but this had paternal sanction. Mysteriously the shock to myself was delayed until I saw the man in question when, having the guts to kill neither him nor myself, something popped in my head and for some time I became a psychiatric out-patient. Adolescence is only another word for melodrama. No grudge now. ... A rugger injury rejected me for National Service. (For the cartoonist of the homosexual, I am a county sprint champion.) I taught for two years at a prep school. Sense ebbed and flowed fairly secure from the terror of love I never wanted to experience again. One or two beauties of twelve or thereabouts sat (dressed) on my (dressed) knee. Ashamed only of secrecy I drearily changed my underclothes. Such performance sounds callous: it was not. Am now twenty-four, and at what I must describe as 'one of our oldest universities': a youthful but boy-less place.

	‘You deny carnal knowledge, then?’		‘You deny carnal knowledge, then?’

Prue at 22:50, 20 June 2025

2025-06-20T22:50:37Z

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	I could not deny J, A, C, or T. if you came round with a pistol tomorrow. You may say, ‘Homos always flaunt themselves like that; that’s why they wear yellow bowties and giggle ecstatic soprano’. No, mine is the empirical romantic belief in the insoluble link between beauty and truth. I may flaunt beliefs badly, with incredible stupidity as on the night when I was disgraced before Sylvia, but the human instinct to seek identification with another through self-revelation cannot be hidden for long. I cannot present a false face to a friend. And the struggle is absurd because all I must say is, ‘Sometimes I fall in love with boys about thirteen. See?’ Usually I take a coward obliqueness, and say, ‘I can understand a bloke falling in love with a boy’. It is enough.		I could not deny J, A, C, or T. if you came round with a pistol tomorrow. You may say, ‘Homos always flaunt themselves like that; that’s why they wear yellow bowties and giggle ecstatic soprano’. No, mine is the empirical romantic belief in the insoluble link between beauty and truth. I may flaunt beliefs badly, with incredible stupidity as on the night when I was disgraced before Sylvia, but the human instinct to seek identification with another through self-revelation cannot be hidden for long. I cannot present a false face to a friend. And the struggle is absurd because all I must say is, ‘Sometimes I fall in love with boys about thirteen. See?’ Usually I take a coward obliqueness, and say, ‘I can understand a bloke falling in love with a boy’. It is enough.
	~~Christ Church, Stewart's college at Oxford~~

	Since the fiasco with Sylvia my defence of the faith has tended to silence. In fact I have only been involved in two clashes up here. One was an argument with a venerable don who likes undergraduates. Men! I patted his white hair because I was drunk and called him a sad gardener of over-blown roses. When a boy goes to seed his bloom withers. The other occasion was when a neighbour, a youth of eighteen straight from school for whom I had no particular liking, happened to come into my room. I imagine he had previously overheard some conversation of mine with a friend, for he suddenly stopped before a photo of Tony on my mantelpiece, and with a compulsion that would have astounded even Pavlov said, ‘God! Are you really as queer as that?’ Indulging what I afterwards realized to have been a lifelong curiosity, though quite on impulse, I let out one of those punches you see in westerns —but missed. Tony, needless to say, remained. What I could not rid from my mind was the hatred of a tone that was utterly convincing in its sincerity.		Since the fiasco with Sylvia my defence of the faith has tended to silence. In fact I have only been involved in two clashes up here. One was an argument with a venerable don who likes undergraduates. Men! I patted his white hair because I was drunk and called him a sad gardener of over-blown roses. When a boy goes to seed his bloom withers. The other occasion was when a neighbour, a youth of eighteen straight from school for whom I had no particular liking, happened to come into my room. I imagine he had previously overheard some conversation of mine with a friend, for he suddenly stopped before a photo of Tony on my mantelpiece, and with a compulsion that would have astounded even Pavlov said, ‘God! Are you really as queer as that?’ Indulging what I afterwards realized to have been a lifelong curiosity, though quite on impulse, I let out one of those punches you see in westerns —but missed. Tony, needless to say, remained. What I could not rid from my mind was the hatred of a tone that was utterly convincing in its sincerity.
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	Incidentally, if you are one of those people who occasionally make jokes of the choirboy-scoutmaster variety this surely reflects only one thing: a sinister aspect of your own semi-unconscious which you daren’t face. Some spotty little excitement way back, probably.		Incidentally, if you are one of those people who occasionally make jokes of the choirboy-scoutmaster variety this surely reflects only one thing: a sinister aspect of your own semi-unconscious which you daren’t face. Some spotty little excitement way back, probably.
	~~Christ Church Cathedral Choir, Oxford~~

	A circumscribed sexuality inevitably exaggerates erotic fantasy, channels energy into extraordinarily trivial obsessions, and produces all manner of hyper-sensitivity. I can suggest only a fraction of such phenomena, and must refuse to invoke the power of sexual desire, though less out of deference for your sensibilities than because I am not prepared to break myself in the attempt. Of desire I will only say that I have vomited physically, in the street with shame and confusion, simply at the sight of a boy. That sometimes, as when once I saw Palestrina, a technicolor child at our choir school whom I have raised in loneliness on to a remote pedestal, I have had to retire to bed with a dose of barbiturates of a proportion more usually- administered to wild stallions about to be transported by air. Palestrina, sartorially a walking advertisement for Daniel Neal’s, with some eight woolly grey suits, seemingly for ever new, appeared on this occasion to have had a four-ounce bottle of ink emptied over the front of his clothes. In addition his nose was bleeding, but neither disturbed the pride and midget self-assurance of his customary progression up the road, his forgotten satchel bumping rhythmically against his flank. .. . But no demonstration of desire. It must suffice to list a few of the phenomena that result from its bafflement. They will be jumbled. One may not, alas, detach one’s own mind and dissect it dispassionately at a remove.		A circumscribed sexuality inevitably exaggerates erotic fantasy, channels energy into extraordinarily trivial obsessions, and produces all manner of hyper-sensitivity. I can suggest only a fraction of such phenomena, and must refuse to invoke the power of sexual desire, though less out of deference for your sensibilities than because I am not prepared to break myself in the attempt. Of desire I will only say that I have vomited physically, in the street with shame and confusion, simply at the sight of a boy. That sometimes, as when once I saw Palestrina, a technicolor child at our choir school whom I have raised in loneliness on to a remote pedestal, I have had to retire to bed with a dose of barbiturates of a proportion more usually- administered to wild stallions about to be transported by air. Palestrina, sartorially a walking advertisement for Daniel Neal’s, with some eight woolly grey suits, seemingly for ever new, appeared on this occasion to have had a four-ounce bottle of ink emptied over the front of his clothes. In addition his nose was bleeding, but neither disturbed the pride and midget self-assurance of his customary progression up the road, his forgotten satchel bumping rhythmically against his flank. .. . But no demonstration of desire. It must suffice to list a few of the phenomena that result from its bafflement. They will be jumbled. One may not, alas, detach one’s own mind and dissect it dispassionately at a remove.

Prue at 22:49, 20 June 2025

2025-06-20T22:49:08Z

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Prue at 22:46, 20 June 2025

2025-06-20T22:46:33Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 22:46, 20 June 2025
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	==Pederast, by Angust Stewart (1961)==		==Pederast, by Angust Stewart (1961)==

	<blockquote>		<blockquote>
	''For I am every dead thing,		For I am every dead thing,

	In whom love wrought new alchemy.		In whom love wrought new alchemy.

	For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness,		For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness,

	From dull privations, and lean emptiness:		From dull privations, and lean emptiness:
	He ~~ruin’d~~ me, and I am re-begot
	Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.''		He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot

			Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.
	</blockquote>		</blockquote>
	- John Donne		- John Donne

Prue: Created page with "Angus Stewart (22 November 1936 – 14 July 1998) was a British writer, best known for his novel ''Sandel'' (1968). According to the website ''Greek Love'', Angus Stewart wrote the essay "Pederast" in 1961 at the age of twenty-four, an autobiographical sketch of himself as a lover of boys. Stewart wrote pseudonymously as "John Davis", contributing the piece as Chapter 6 (pp. 78-95) of Underdogs: Eighteen Victims of Society, edited and introduced by Philip Toynbee (Lo..."

2025-06-20T22:43:59Z

Created page with "Angus Stewart (22 November 1936 – 14 July 1998) was a British writer, best known for his novel ''Sandel'' (1968). According to the website ''Greek Love'', Angus Stewart wrote the essay "Pederast" in 1961 at the age of twenty-four, an autobiographical sketch of himself as a lover of boys. Stewart wrote pseudonymously as "John Davis", contributing the piece as Chapter 6 (pp. 78-95) of Underdogs: Eighteen Victims of Society, edited and introduced by Philip Toynbee (Lo..."

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