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 and trolling and all. Very keen on the upcoming identity battles, which I dub:
- PedoSchwing2025 if conservative opposition collapses quietly,
or
- 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, as well as going full-on High Boy-Lover Priesthood in the mode 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.
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, evaluate, and, when they have run their course, bring such relationships to an end? Are we to limit ourselves to the old BSA 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, most of them, end up in a heterosexual relationship. 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.)
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.
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, internionally-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.
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 I'm almost ready to record, with its famous 3 myths and 3 speeches. 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, and ending with the boy chasing girls his own age like a proper heterosexual. In between, of course, I put 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.
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 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 lives. I'm stock-piling heroic poetry against the time when the public forum is completely feminized, and no one but boy-lovers has anything masculine to offer boys.
---Didaskalos, a Good Latin Teacher Gone Bad. (My Performance Alter Ego) ---Mark Miner, In Real Life.