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A little history lesson for the ignorant
Posted at Crossroads by Conscientious Objector on Friday,
April 6, at 11:44 AM
In reply to Child abuse has occurred throughout history!
posted by Concerned & Angry
"I don't know much about history"
That, ma'am, is all too obvious. You should avoid bragging about your shortcomings.
"but I do know that children have been abused in every age and culture, starting with the Greeks. Usually the abusers write tales very much like the ones that appear on the boylove boards, describing their 'love' in candy-sweet terms that fool the unwary. And tragically, whenever this happens, the boys and girls and women who are abused"
Ma'am, I wish I could get it through your head that I'm a BOYlover, not a girl-lover. The last time I showed any interest in a female's anatomy was when Cousin Bessie and I played Nurse and Doctor when we were both six, and even then the interest was purely intellectual.
I hate to shock you, but I'm opposed to sex between men and girls. I think that the scientific studies show fairly conclusively that girls react much more negatively to early sexual experiences than boys do (though even in that case there are exceptions). And of course young girls' bodies aren't designed for pregnancy. Sex in such cases is much more likely to result in trauma.
And that, without doubt, is why you CAs like to conflate the figures for man-girl sex and man-boy sex – because the unpleasant truth you're trying to avoid is that boys are psychologically and physiologically designed to enjoy sex earlier than girls are. That's why you and Pedo-Hag just can't understand boylove. Your sexuality is different from a male's.
"the boys and girls and women who are abused are never heard; they are the silent voices throughout history. We only hear the abusers' side of the story."
*Long sigh.* Look, ma'am, I'm a little rushed for time (as I have a very cute nine-year-old waiting for me to give him a bath), but I'll try to explain the history of boylove to you in the sort of one-syllable words that you can understand.
Here's how it worked in Greek times— No, wait; I can anticipate your cry of anguish at this point. "Greeks!" you say. "Weren't they pagans? Didn't we Christians show that the pagans were devil-worshippers who were stumbling in darkness?" So let me just point out first that boylove, in its various manifestations, was practiced by indigenous religions throughout the world, by the Buddhist samurai and the monks of Japan, by other Buddhists and Confucianists and Taoists throughout Eastern Asia, by the Jews of medieval Spain, and, until the Arab world was infected by Christian value systems, by the Muslims of every century. (I refer you here to the excellent essay on the history of pederasty by Sir Richard Burton at the end of his translation of the Arabian Nights, which I know you won't read, because it conflicts with your preconceptions.) It's the Christians who are blind, ma'am, not the pagans.
Back to the Greeks: At a certain age, boys were considered ready to be trained in the mysteries of love. The literary sources say that this was at age twelve; the art sources suggest that prepubescent boys were also involved. Never mind, the principle is the same: the adult decides that the boy is ready to learn about sex, just as today a father decides that his son is ready to learn about baseball or a mother decides that her daughter is ready to go to ballet school. (By the way, I take it from your remarks about "children not being ready to take on adult responsibilities" that you've never been granted the privilege of attending a ballet school or drama school or performing arts school, where kids are trained to participate in professional performances. Boot camps are easy by comparison; the kids thrive on the experience.)
The boy, of course, gets the choice of choosing his sexual partner. Here in our so-called enlightened Christian society, the only choice he would receive would be a girl his own age. Now tell me, ma'am, when your son wanted to learn baseball, did you send him off to learn it from a bunch of kids who knew no more than he did about the game? Or did you hire an adult coach who was practiced in the game?
I can say from personal experience that you need someone more practiced than yourself to learn lovemaking. Otherwise, you make the most godawful mistakes. I know a guy who foolishly followed his church's rule that he not have sex with anyone until he was married. Naturally, he made a mess of it on his honeymoon night, tearing his virgin bride's hymen all asunder and not giving her the type of extended foreplay that women enjoy.
The Greeks were wiser. For several years, the boy would be mentored by a man, not only in love but also in other important skills in life. This would last until the boy became a man himself; then he would take a loved boy into training and teach him all he knew. And only then, after the man had had fifteen or twenty years' worth of experience in lovemaking, would he take his bride to bed. Just think how much you would have enjoyed your honeymoon night, ma'am, if your husband had spent fifteen years being trained by his lover and training other boys in turn.
Now, the important point about this – it should not have escaped your reasoning powers, but I'm sure it has – is that every Greek boylover who wrote about how much pleasure a loved boy receives from having sex with a man had made love to men when he was a boy. There's the testimony you were looking for from your "child abuse victims."
By the way, ma'am, part of the deal in Greek times was that a boy could say no to a suitor. You still haven't explained why your son didn't do so.
Conscientious Objector, because he won't break a boy's heart by saying no
You pedophiles make me want to scream!
Posted at Crossroads by Concerned & Angry on Friday,
April 6, at 4:32 PM
In reply to A little history lesson for the ignorant posted
by Conscientious Objector
WHY DIDN'T HE SAY NO? BECAUSE HE WAS NINE YEARS OLD!
Honestly, you people are so dense sometimes that I want to shake you till you come to your senses. If you tell a nine-year-old, "I'd like to do something with you that will make you very happy and that you'll enjoy tremendously," he doesn't say, "Hmm. Give me the details, and I'll decide whether I should go through with it." He trusts you, because you're an adult and he's a child. (Plus he's probably afraid you'll punish him if he says no, but I know that's something you'd prefer to forget.) So he lets you molest him, and when it's through he goes off and is sick, but does he tell you? OF COURSE NOT. You told him that sex would make him happy, so if it hasn't made him happy, then there must be something wrong with HIM, and he doesn't want you to know that he's weird. Besides, he can see that it makes YOU happy, and because you love him (or he THINKS you do), he wants more than anything to please you. So he's sick and he's sick and he's sick, till he's ready to kill himself rather than admit to you that he's miserable.
As for your tale about the abused becoming abusers in Greek society, that's called the generational cycle of abuse. You can read about it in any standard textbook on child abuse.
CA stands for Concerned & Angry
I agree
Posted at Crossroads by Pedo-Hag on Friday, April 6, at 4:48
PM
In reply to You pedophiles make me want to scream! posted
by Concerned & Angry
I have to echo what Concerned & Angry says. Conscientious Objector, I know that you don't like me using girls as examples, but I think my own experience could have happened to any boy, and I can tell you that it just didn't occur to me that I could say no to my father. He was the adult, everything in my life depended on him, so of course I said yes. And even when I heard a lecture on child abuse in school and knew that I should report him, it was still a wrenching decision. Can you imagine what it's like being a child who knows that she has a choice between suffering in silence or watching her father be sent to prison?
I believe that all of us here tend to project our own life experiences onto others. You've pointed out many times that abuse survivors project their own experiences onto your life, assuming that certain harm that occurred to them also occurred to you. What I think you haven't acknowledged is that this type of projection works both ways. Because you would have found it easy to say no to your older friend, you have been underestimating how difficult most children would find it to say no to an adult they admired.
I'm not saying that you've been intentionally distorting the experiences of abuse survivors. I just think it's human to believe that what other people have experienced is the same as what we have experienced.
Pedo-Hag
Co-Webmaster
Crossroads
You live in 21st-century America
Posted at Crossroads by Conscientious Objector on Saturday,
April 7, at 5:05 AM
In reply to I agree posted by Pedo-Hag
Ma'am and ma'am, you both seem to have forgotten a simple fact: You do not live in Ancient Greece. If you had, you would have been freer to say no.
(I'm going to have to pretend for the purposes of this post that you're a boy, Pedo-Hag. It's a bit of a struggle, I'll admit.)
Suppose that you're a boy living in Ancient Greece, and a man says that he wants to have sex with you. You know that you have the right to say no. The reason you didn't know this in 21st-century America is that you were brought up in a society that refuses to acknowledge that some boys and men like to have sex with each other. If you'd lived in a society where this was all out in the open, other people would have been watching, and any suitors who harassed you would have had to explain their behavior to other adults, just as a man who sexually harasses a woman is forced to explain himself to other people in our society.
Abuse is less likely to occur in a society where true love is openly permitted. Once you understand that, you'll see why a society that allows boylove is less likely to be burdened with real child abuse.
By the way, Concerned & Angry, I'm genuinely interested in how far you go with this anti-boylove stuff of yours. Would I make your body shake with indignation if I sent a Valentine to the boy who stayed with me last night? (He was a legal sixteen-year-old, Pedo-Hag, so take your finger off that delete key.) Is it the love you object to, or just the sex? If it's the latter, I know a Puritan when I smell her.
Conscientious Objector, who thankfully lives these days in a country that is less infected with Puritanism
P.S. Oh, and when your son gets married because you've brainwashed him into thinking that is his only sexual option, I assume that you'll be adding yourself to the next edition of your child abuse textbook as an example of a perpetrator of the "generational cycle of abuse."
WHAT?!!!
Posted at Crossroads by Concerned & Angry on Saturday,
April 7, at 9:42 AM
In reply to You live in 21st-century America posted by Conscientious
Objector
OF COURSE I DON'T WANT YOU TO SEND A LOVE POEM TO A BOY! ARE YOU CRAZY?
Adding my two cents
Posted at Crossroads by Pedo-Hag on Saturday, April 7, at
9:46 AM
In reply to WHAT?!!! posted by Concerned & Angry
Actually, Conscientious Objector, I find it kind of flattering to be thought of as a boy around here. Though you aren't exactly my ideal for a mentor, I can think of lots of boylovers here who I would have been glad to have as nonsexual mentors when I was young.
I'm afraid that once again my experience leads me to disagree with you, because my father started courting me (from his perspective) when I was thirteen, and he didn't have sex with me till I was fifteen. In many ways, those first two years were the worst. I knew something was wrong – I knew that grown men don't usually take thirteen-year-olds out dancing – but I couldn't figure out what was wrong, so I didn't know how to stop it. How could I say, "No, please, Daddy, take back that mink coat because it makes me feel sick"? It was almost a relief when he took me to bed finally and I figured out what this was all about.
What I have a hard time putting across to you (because your experience was so different) is that much of my pain did not come from the sex at all. It came from the idea of being forced to enter into a romantic relationship with an adult. I sought parental love from my father; instead, he gave me romantic Valentines. So many children are desperately looking to adults to be nothing more than parents, teachers, and yes, mentors. Is it fair to take this away from them for the sake of the few boys, like yourself, who have wanted sex?
I wouldn't bother to ask such a question if I wasn't convinced that you, like everyone else here, genuinely cares about boys' welfare. That's the common ground I hope we can build upon during these discussions.
Pedo-Hag
Co-Webmaster
Crossroads
From: goldstar@freespirits.org
To: whiterose@anonymail.com
Date: April 7, 11:05 PDT
Subject: Re: My love life
On April 7, at 13:30 EDT, whiterose@anonymail.com wrote:
<<No loved boys – I've never had a sexual relationship with a boy.>>
Well, that's a relief. You've saved me having to give you my lecture on the benefits of waiting until the laws are changed. :)
Seriously, if you ever consider having sex with a boy, I hope you'll discuss the matter with me. I've had too many friends get the idea into their heads that a sexual relationship with a boy now would be like it was in the good ol' days of Greece. They've found out too late the effects on the boy of having an illegal relationship.
<<I've had four young friends, though.>>
Ah, so you're polypais, many-boyed. (Honestly, it's a legit word. I found it in the Liddell-Scott Greek dictionary.) I'm the monogamous type myself, though my first relationship ended in divorce. (So to speak; at any rate, I haven't seen the boy for fifteen years.)
<<My first relationship was in many ways the nicest. He was a boy I tutored in math through a mentorship program in college, and I wasn't at all attracted to him, so I knew from the start that my love of boys wasn't selfish. I wasn't just spending time with boys for my own pleasure.>>
Brick belongs to a mentoring program, and he says that he makes a point of searching out the ugliest boys he can find, because he knows that they're the ones least likely to be picked by other mentors (even non-ped mentors).
<<My second and third loves were a pair of twins; they were sons of one of my father's business partners. I started by babysitting them when they were ten, and I remained a sort of uncle figure to them until they went off to college.>>
There's a debate going on at BoyChat at the moment over whether boylovers should view themselves as mentors or as romantic partners. Personally, I think that boylovers who argue that their young friends are their equals in a romantic relationship have been ingesting too much of the feminist nonsense that sexual love between unequals is inherently abusive. Of course a boylover-boy relationship is unequal, just like a parent-child relationship is. Any boylover who thinks that an eight-year-old can reason things out with the same maturity as an eighteen-year-old should get his head examined.
<<The nice thing about the twins is that they had a built-in chaperone. They always did things together, so I never had to worry about being alone with one of them. Even though I had doubts about my self-control in those days (I still thought that pedophiles were like guns with the safety lock off, ready to fire at any moment), I didn't think I had the skill to seduce two boys simultaneously.>>
Ah, but what if they set out to seduce you? Brick (as you'll recall from his posts on this at BoyChat) is a piano teacher, and he says that he has had to turn down passes from three boys in the past year alone. He thinks that boylovers must have some special aroma to them that can only be sensed by sexually eager boys.
Of course, Brick is a teen-boylover like yourself. In my AOA, the problem is with boys who have no idea what they're doing. For example, when I first started my business a few years ago, I had a lot of local clients, and sometimes I'd pay house visits to them. On one occasion, a client I was visiting at home had to go out because of a family emergency, and he left me alone with his adorable ten-year-old son. The boy had just learned wrestling at school, and he wanted to show off his new wrestling outfit and demonstrate his moves on me.
Took me a month's worth of cold showers to recover from that experience. I couldn't blame the boy or even the father. After all, how could they know I was a boylover? It would be easier if we lived in a world where we could say openly, "No, I'm sorry – I'm a boylover, so I can't babysit your son till he puts his clothes back on."
But no, the world would rather pretend that people like us are all lurking in alleyways, so situations like this keep happening.
<<My latest young friend— Well, it's too early to say how things will go with him.>>
Shoot, you can at least give me a hint. Blond? Blue-eyed? Familiar with the works of Vitruvius? Any of the above will qualify him for my official list (now filling several volumes) of Boys I Mustn't Snuggle Too Closely With.
<<I still haven't made up my mind (not that it's a living issue at the moment), but I'm leaning toward the idea of celibacy. *Sigh*. Ironically, it's Conscientious Objector's posts about pederastic societies that are deciding me on this matter. The more he talks about the benefits of boylove sexual relationships in a society that oversees and guides such relationships, the more I feel that sex with a boy under any other circumstances would be downright dangerous, whether or not the police got involved. There just seem to be too many disasters that can arise in relationships that exist outside the bounds of societal acceptance. I don't think I'd even have sex with a boy if the laws changed, unless society set up some sort of framework for approved relationships between boylovers and boys.>>
I would, like a shot. :) But that just goes to show that you're a better man than I, sir, and my respect for you rises accordingly. I get so tired of reading posts at BoyChat in which the author proclaims, "I love boys!" and then spends twenty paragraphs demonstrating, through every word he writes, that he cares about nothing except his own pleasure.
<<I'm afraid I'm basically a selfish person, because it's taken me such a long time to reach this conclusion, even though I'd started to suspect this even before I read posts like Concerned & Angry's. I find the whole idea of spending my life alone more frightening than you can imagine. Well, you can imagine it, but most people can't. Yet when you come down to it, it's the boy's welfare that matters, not my own. I'd be ashamed to call myself a boylover if I didn't believe that.>>
Self-sacrifice is an underrated quality in our society, don't you think? The boylove boards, with all of their narcissistic talk about "I want this" are actually paradises compared to my local gym, where the "normal" men hang out. I'd hate to be a heterosexual woman; I sometimes think there isn't a straight non-ped man in this city who spends even five minutes a day thinking of anything other than what he can get out of the woman he "loves."
It's nice to meet someone like you, who understands that love is about giving, not taking, even if that giving means sacrificing your own pleasure for the sake of the beloved.
<<I've been enjoying these e-mails we've been exchanging.>>
Me too, so may I be so bold as to suggest that we might take this conversation to a higher level?
I'm going to be flying into your city for a conference next week. (Yes, I'm afraid I still remember which city you live in. Posts that I edit for security reasons tend to linger in my mind.) Would you like to get together for lunch or dinner? I don't know yet what my schedule will be, and unfortunately I won't have Internet access once I've arrived. Do you know of any handy tree holes where I could drop a note to you to arrange a time for us to meet?
Always assuming, of course, that you're not wise enough to protect your privacy against FBI agents like me. :)
Yours,
Gold Star
* * *
Johnnie sat with his elbows on his desk and with his teeth biting his thumb. Through the open window came the flutter of a passing pigeon, the acid tingle of car fumes, and the faint shouts of a street vendor selling flowers. A soft April breeze, picking up suddenly, flipped the pages of a magazine on the desk. Johnnie took no notice. He stared down for several minutes more at Gold Star's letter before his hand moved toward the mouse and he pointed the arrow to the "Reply" button. Then he changed his mind and disconnected the computer from the Internet.
The phone next to him rang almost immediately. He let it ring for a moment more before picking up the receiver and saying, "John here."
"John?" The voice in the receiver sounded faint, as though it were coming from a long distance. "It's Sandra. Sandra Smith."
"Oh, hi, Sandra. How are you?" With a vague desire to keep his hands occupied, he picked up a highlighter from his pen holder and removed the cap. Beyond the pen holder lay open the latest letter from the twins, accompanied by a photograph showing two smiling college students.
"I hope I'm not bothering you."
"No, not at all." He pulled the magazine toward him, flipped it open, and began highlighting the key words in every sentence.
"I only asked because your phone's been busy for a couple of hours now. I thought you might be talking to your girlfriend or something."
"No such luck." Johnnie had long ago learned the conventional replies; he said them now without having to think them through. "I've just been on the Internet, so the modem tied up the line." He highlighted the key words of the next paragraph: Pedophiles . . . predators . . . prey . . .
"Oh, I see. Well, if you're sure I'm not bothering you . . ."
"No, it's nice to have a break from the computer. Real-life human contact is always better." He had never imagined that Sandra would be so diffident over the phone; he had seen her occasionally at work, giving brisk orders to her secretary. His pen moved to the third paragraph: Pedophiles . . groom . . . abuse . . . molest . . . abduct . . . murder . . .
"I should probably have just waited till Monday and spoken to you at work."
"And get us in trouble for discussing personal affairs on company time?" He tried to nudge her forward with a jocular tone. Treat . . castrate . . . imprison . . . execute . . . pedophiles . . .
"That's true. I wouldn't want to get you into trouble."
Sandra fell silent, apparently contemplating this possibility. Johnnie nudged her again, saying, "Was there something you wanted to ask me about?"
"Yes, it's about Milano."
Johnnie dropped the pen.
"Milano?" he said, his voice breathless, as he crawled under the table to retrieve the highlighter.
"He's my son – you remember him? You gave me some geometry books last month to give to him."
"Oh, of course. Milano." He found the highlighter under the radiator and pulled it out of the dust.
"Well, he liked the books— Are you okay?"
"Yes, fine. I just bumped myself." He rubbed the back of his head as he returned to the chair. "He found the books helpful, then?"
"Yes, he liked them more than the school textbooks, but he's been asking me lots of questions about them that I can't answer. I never went to college, you know."
Her voice sounded so apologetic that Johnnie said, "Neither did my father, and he's one of the wisest men I know. I sometimes think the purpose of college is to drain people of all their innate intelligence."
Sandra laughed. Johnnie, abandoning the magazine, began to play with the cap of the pen, flicking it on and off the highlighter. "You were saying about the books . . ."
"It's really too much to ask of you, after your generosity in giving us the books—"
"No, no, they were just gathering dust on my shelves. What else can I do for you?"
"Milano wants to talk to you."
The cap of the pen went flying and disappeared into a dark corner. Sandra said tentatively, "John?"
"Sorry. I was just distracted by . . ." He looked around frantically and saw his waiting laptop. "By a mouse. A mouse just ran across the floor here."
"Oh, I'm sorry." Sandra's voice was immediately sympathetic. "Would you like me to come by with some mousetraps? I have several extras."
Johnnie caught sight of the magazine lying open to its highlighted words. "No! No, I wouldn't put you to the trouble, Sandra. Besides, this place is a perpetual clutter. I'm always embarrassed to invite people over." He paused, but there was nothing more forthcoming from the other end of the line, so he said tentatively, "You were saying something just now about Milano . . ."
"Yes, he has some questions he'd like to ask you about the books. I told him that we couldn't bother you any more than we had—"
"Nonsense, I'd be glad to help." Johnnie hoped that his voice sounded sufficiently cool. The back of his neck was beginning to sweat. "Is he there now? You could put him on the line."
"Oh." Sandra was silent a moment. "Well, yes, I suppose . . . Well, if you just wait a minute, I could go see if he's—"
"No, wait." Johnnie's hand closed convulsively around the magazine and crushed it. "If you had something else in mind . . ."
"Well, I thought perhaps . . If it's not too much trouble . . . Would you like to come over to our place?"
The magazine, slipping from Johnnie's hand, slid off the table and landed in the copper trash can with a clang.
"John? Are you there?"
"Yes, of course." He was surprised at how calm his voice sounded. The rest of his body was still vibrating from the crash. "I'd be glad to stop by, Sandra. It's awfully hard to discuss geometry over the phone, what with all those visual proofs."
"That's just what I thought." The relief in Sandra's voice was palpable. "And actually, right now isn't a good time for you to talk to Milano, because he's getting ready to be picked up by his father. Would you like to visit our place after work on Monday? You could have dinner here afterwards."
"Sure. That's fine." The words still sounded calm; Johnnie was amazed at himself.
"Are you certain I'm not cutting into your leisure time? If you have a date or something . . ."
"No, nothing like that. I tend to spend my evenings doing idle stuff like surfing the Web. It'll be nice to get out for a change. Monday after work, then?"
"Sure, Monday. And I'll make you a nice— Oh, per Bacco, Kim's at the door. I'll have to go."
"That's fine. I'll see you at work Monday."
"See you then, John. Ciao bello." The line went dead.
Johnnie continued to sit for a moment, very still, as though he were a fragile vase that might break. Then he whispered, "Gods." Then: "Gods!"
He sprang over to the window and flung it open. Below him, Saturday shoppers clogged the streets, drawn from their houses by the mild breezes and the amber sun. Flowers from caged trees near the curb showered their golden petals upon passersby.
In the movies, the man always shouted from his window at moments like this, Johnnie thought. But none of the people passing in the streets below would have understood. He flung himself back down into his chair, waited impatiently for the computer to come back online, switched his Web browser to the BoyChat index, clicked on the link that said, "Post a New Message," and began to type furiously.
"Something wonderful just happened," he said. "Some of you may remember when I posted last month about meeting a boy named M . . ."
He finished the post, scanned it quickly to be sure that he had not compromised his security or Milano's in any way, and triumphantly clicked the "Send Message" button. The post appeared on the BoyChat index, to be read by thousands of people around the world, including the ones who would greet the news with congratulations.
Johnnie still felt restless. He wondered whether he should spend his energy going for a walk or cleaning the apartment he had already cleaned that morning. Then, just as he was about to close down the laptop, his eye caught sight of the icon signifying Gold Star's e-mail.
His heart beating, he pulled up a reply form and began typing rapidly, as though trying to enter a closing gap. "John Steadman," his e-mail said, "332-1/2 Theater Avenue, Apt. 2B."
He finished typing the remainder of the address and phone number, then hit the "Send" button. As he did so, a weight of doom descended upon him.
There was no way to retrieve the letter, as there had been in the old days when one could pry open the mailbox. His e-mail was on its way to the West Coast – might already have reached there by this time. Now he could only wait. He switched over to the Crossroads index, looking idly at the subject headings of the new messages left that day, but he did not touch his mouse.
The knock on the door came five minutes later.
He jumped in his seat with such vigor that his mouse skidded off the desk and landed in the trash can with a clatter. He might as well have lit a neon sign saying, "I'm home!" he thought bitterly as he tried to reason through the haze of his panic. It could not possibly be the FBI, not in that short a time. Could it be the local police? Could Gold Star – whatever he might be – have called directory assistance for an out-of-state number, explained to the police who Johnnie was, and had a cop car speeding to his home, all in a matter of minutes?
Unless— Of course, oh, gods, yes. Gold Star already knew what city he was living in. He could have arranged to have the police biding beforehand, awaiting the moment when White Rose would foolishly reveal his identity to a stranger he knew only from the Internet. But if Gold Star were a child advocate or law enforcement agent or some other pedophile headhunter, could he really have fooled the Free Spirits Committee for this long?
Then a terrible thought occurred to Johnnie. How did he even know that the e-mail came from Gold Star? True, the letter was in Gold Star's usual style, but Johnnie had only a vague knowledge of the mechanics of the Internet. Perhaps it would have been easy for the police to intercept a genuine letter from Gold Star, insert their own paragraph inviting Johnnie to reveal himself, and then send it on, awaiting his reply like cats watching a mouse-hole. Perhaps they had been monitoring his Internet Service Provider for weeks; perhaps they had been reading every e-mail and post he wrote.
Perhaps they already knew about his newest young friend.
For a moment, the room spun. Then another knock, louder than before, cut through his dizziness. He stared at the phone, wondering whether he could chance a call to Paul. He should have been prepared for this; he should have had the phone number of a lawyer in his pocket at all times. He imagined calling his parents from the police station . . .
Oh, gods; this could not be happening. He was an ordinary citizen who had committed no crime. There couldn't be any police waiting for him outside. It must be the next-door neighbor, asking to borrow change again for the laundry machine. Resolutely Johnnie got up from his chair, walked up to the door, and unbolted it, feeling his blood scream inside him.
A stranger was standing at the doorstep. He was about the same age as Johnnie, with nondescript wheat-colored hair and amber eyes. The only thing remarkable about his appearance was a narrow scar down the back of his right hand, such as might be obtained from battling with dangerous men. He was wearing dark slacks and a dark turtleneck, with an equally dark sports coat over the shirt, the sort of clothing an undercover cop might wear.
He was not smiling. "Johnnie Steadman?" he said.
Johnnie knew then that this was not the new paper deliverer, collecting his bill. He stood rooted where he was, feeling horror wash over him like a frigid Arctic wave. From the window came the faint cry of the vendor continuing to sell his wares, oblivious to the fact that the world had just come to an end.
"Johnnie Steadman?" the stranger persisted, his mouth tight and his eyes sharp.
Johnnie managed to speak then in a hoarse whisper: "Who are you?"
The stranger appeared to consider this question at length, as though he were in a profession where one did not usually offer one's name. Finally he said, "My name is Delius Frey."
The stranger's face was beginning to look familiar to Johnnie, as though he had seen him in a picture before. Desperately, Johnnie tried to remember the name of the FBI agent who was famous for hunting down online pedophiles. And at that moment he remembered, and he took a step to block the man's view.
It was too late. His very movement had alerted the man, and the stranger's gaze flicked over to the laptop, still lying open. As though in response to the move, the computer's energy saver turned the screen blank, but not before the man could see what had been there: the green background with the word "Crossroads" emblazoned at the top.
The man smiled brightly then, like a hunter who has reached a long-sought quarry; his face seemed fairly to blaze with light. He reached into his pocket, and then held something out.
Johnnie put forward his hand mechanically. Following long-ago kindergarten training to obey authorities, he prepared himself to accept whatever he was given: an identification badge, a search-and-seizure warrant, a pair of handcuffs, a bullet through the heart.
What he was given was a piece of paper so tiny that Johnnie had to bring his hand up to his face to see what the object was. The paper was cut in straight, tight lines, and it glittered under the sun.
Still smiling, the stranger said, "You know me as Gold Star."
* * *
I have a yf now!
Posted at BoyChat by True Boylover on Saturday, April 7,
at 2:14 PM
Guess what! I have a young friend now!
His name is B— [full name deleted by moderator], he attends [deleted] School, and I met him because I mow the lawn for his parents. The first day he brought orange juice out for me to drink, so I took a break and we started talking, and now he does this every time I visit!
It's so wonderful to be in love. And no, I haven't had a single fantasy about raping or murdering B; I don't think I ever will. He's just too sweet a boy for me to consider hurting. White Rose, you were absolutely right that meeting real boys would help me get away from crazy fantasies.
I still haven't found a job; [deleted] is sort of a hard place to find work. I was almost thinking of moving to [deleted] City, which is two hours away, but now, of course, I can't! I'll mow lawns for the rest of my life if it means being able to see B.
I never would have had the courage to talk with B if it hadn't been for you guys. I sure hope that you guys will come visit me and meet B, because it's all due to you that I have a young friend!
Love,
TB
TB, you have e-mail (nt)
Posted at BoyChat by Brick on Saturday, April 7, at 2:22
PM
In reply to I have a yf now! posted by True Boylover
no text
Administrative notice to all participants
Posted at BoyChat by Brick on Saturday, April 7, at
2:45 PM
Gentlemen (and one or two ladies), I'd like to remind you that BoyChat's Rule #7 forbids posts that request meetings with minor-aged participants at this board. Just to clarify, that also means that we do not wish to see any posts that suggest you will arrange real-life meetings between boys that you know in real life and participants at this board.
It's not just that the cops are watching us, though we do put a lot of effort into keeping this board legal. The Free Spirits Committee made this rule long ago because we want to protect any underaged boylovers, loved boys, or other boys who wish to post here. I know you guys care about your young friends and don't want to put them at any additional risk. Real-life meetings between adults who have only known each other through e-mail are risky enough.
So please, remember the rules!
Brick
Webmaster and All-Round Dogsbody
BoyChat
Link: The Seven Rules of BoyChat
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