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You're just not getting it, White Rose
Posted at the Crossroads Committee Forum by Gold Star on
Saturday, June 2, at 3:30 PM
In reply to Why not? posted by White Rose
<<prejudiced against her just because she's a child advocate>>
I'm trying not to be. It's true that I've never met a CA who knew the meaning of the words "civilized dialogue," but that's true of a number of our BL participants as well. I wouldn't want anyone to make generalizations about me just because they'd suffered under an onslaught of Conscientious Objector's posts. (Sorry, C.O., but you know that I prefer the gentleman's approach to debating with non-peds.)
<<has made a number of excellent points>>
I agree with you that Concerned & Angry is a lot more rational in her arguments than most of the non-peds we get at Crossroads. Certainly her posts have substance, unlike Lynch Em's. But you're still missing the point I've been trying to make: this isn't about dialogue, it's about security.
Sure, we like to have people on this committee who are committed to conversations across the divide, but the primary qualification for being a moderator is a willingness to protect the security of our participants. And I just don't think that Concerned & Angry is the type who would do that.
Let me give you an example. Five months ago, in your first post to Crossroads, you were naive enough to post information about your real-life location. I edited the information out of your post, and that was the end of the matter. Do you think that Concerned & Angry would have rested contented there? I don't; I think that she would have passed the information on to her network of CA friends. And in a little while the police of your city would have received a fax saying, "Here is information that will help you to locate a man who posts at that notorious boylove board BoyChat, and here are his posts in which he describes how he is grooming a boy named M." And shortly thereafter the police would appear at your door with a warrant to search your belongings for evidence that you were molesting M. And meanwhile, of course, another set of police would be placing M under interrogation.
White Rose, part of a child advocate's job is to track down peds. If we let Concerned & Angry onto this committee, it will be like letting the wolf in among the sheep.
<<My first choice is still Paul.>>
First of all, this argument is probably moot. Paul has never posted at Crossroads, and I doubt that he'd be interested in joining the committee of a secular forum. But if you're determined to discuss this . . .
I agree with you that Paul doesn't represent as high a security risk as Concerned & Angry; I don't think he'd deliberately out anyone. But I do worry that he would slip and give out personal information. You haven't forgotten, have you, that At Peace had to edit one of Paul's posts at CBF last month because he accidentally used your real first name?
I think Paul's problem is that he is determined to identify his own situation with ours, which is admirable in a way, but it blinds him to the fact that our danger from an outing is much greater than his. He talked at CBF last month about the problems he had finding a job because he was ex-gay. Does he think that one of us would be so lucky as to simply have an employer turn him down? The first thing any potential employer would do is call the police; then he'd spread the word to everyone he knew to watch out for this psychopath.
Because Paul doesn't realize how much worse our situation is than his, he makes slips. And I'm not saying that he does this just because he's a non-ped. Pedo-Hag is a non-ped, yet she's the quickest person on this committee to catch security problems. The difference is that she is BL-friendly, so she takes greater care to understand the problems boylovers face.
Nor am I concerned only about non-ped committee members breaking security. When Conscientious Objector joined this committee, we questioned him very closely to make sure that he wouldn't out the child advocates he was fighting against. Yet I never worried that C.O. would accidentally reveal information about a member, BL or non-BL. I do worry about that with Paul.
White Rose, the reason I keep vetoing your nomination is that, aside from the importance of protecting our participants (which is foremost in my mind), this issue hits too close to home. Moderators are granted access, not only to information about our participants, but also to this board. Think about what that means. Here on this board, Conscientious Objector has mentioned that he lives in the Netherlands. Pedo-Hag has said that she attends law school and that her sister is a lesbian. I've told you guys that I'm a freelance Web designer. And you've posted your first name here. All of this is information that we wouldn't post publicly. Are you sure you want to risk having information like that appear on the public boards, where it will be read by millions of people?
Gold Star
You've got to be kidding
Posted at the Crossroads Committee Forum by White Rose on
Saturday, June 2, at 3:45 PM
In reply to You're just not getting it, White Rose posted
by Gold Star
> The difference is that Pedo-Hag is BL-friendly
Let me get this straight. A qualification for this committee is that you have to be in favor of boylove? Gods, no wonder you never have any non-boylover moderators!
Don't you realize, Gold Star, that ninety-nine percent of the world thinks that boylove (even celibate boylove) is sick or depraved or in Paul's case a bad idea? I thought that this committee was supposed to represent a cross-section of views on boylove, not just consist of people on the pro-boylove bandwagon.
I have an idea: Why don't we give up the whole idea of having non-boylovers participate at our board at all? Instead, we can all sit around and tell each other what wonderful guys we are.
> I agree with you that Paul doesn't represent as high a security risk
Security risk? A security risk was asking a boylover who'd only been posting for two months a boylover whom no one here had ever met in real life to join the committee. Gold Star, you know I have reason to believe that Paul won't out anyone, deliberately or otherwise. Don't give me this bull about him being a security risk.
> this isn't about dialogue, it's about security
No, it isn't. You make that quite clear in your last paragraph. This isn't about the participants' security or Pedo-Hag's security or my security. This is about Gold Star's security. You don't want anyone here who might make you just a wee bit nervous.
Look, Gold Star, I'm just as jittery as any other boylover at the thought of the policeman's knock; I know that innocence is no protection for a boylover in this world. But you carry this to the point of paranoia. You seem to feel that we shouldn't associate with anyone except boylovers and BL-friendly people like Pedo-Hag. It's a wonder to me that you ever became Webmaster of a BL/non-BL board. And it's a greater wonder to me that you allow anyone on this committee other than yourself.
That's the ultimate way to protect your security, you know: to sit in isolation, with no one around you. Is that what you're aiming for? A one-man board?
Johnnie
* * *
Johnnie clicked on the "Send Message" button, keeping his eyes on the laptop only long enough to see his post appear, accompanied by a picture of a white rose that Delius had designed for him. Then he swivelled in his chair to look behind him. All he could see was Delius's back as he stared at the screen of the kitchen computer. His finger was stroking the left-click button of the mouse. Finally he moved the mouse, and Johnnie caught a glimpse of the white arrow as it rose to turn off the Web browser. After a minute, the computer screen went blank and Delius reached down to turn off the computer. Johnnie had never seen him do this before; it was like watching a power company turn off the lights of a city.
"Aren't you going to respond to that one?" he asked.
Delius shook his head as he scraped back the chair legs and stood, reaching toward the mug of cocoa next to the mouse. "We're wasting bandwidth. We should be discussing this offline."
"I thought that Pedo-Hag and Conscientious Objector might have something to contribute."
"Perhaps," said Delius, his face half-turned as he sipped from the mug. "But we've gone beyond administrative issues, haven't we?"
The sound of his soft sipping could be heard throughout the kitchen, louder than the rumble of afternoon traffic making its way through the open windows at the far end of the house. After a while, Johnnie said, "Yes, I suppose so."
Delius leaned over and pulled from the table the Saturday delivery of mail, which Johnnie had brought up from the mailbox and had stacked neatly amidst a clutter of design sketches for Websites, clippings from the local newspaper on the legal debate over the use of encrypted e-mail, and paintings of white roses that Delius had been showing to Johnnie. Delius opened an envelope marked as a phone bill, winced at the contents, and set it aside. The next object was an advertisement for a dating service, which he flung into the overflowing trash can without pause, and the next was a computer magazine, which he tossed into a pile on the floor.
The last item was a flat cardboard box, unmarked. Delius glanced at it and said, "Could you get my scissors, Johnnie? They're in the library."
A gentle June breeze was stirring the curtains of the bright room as Johnnie arrived there. Although the summer sun drove darkness from the farthest corners, Johnnie had to search for several minutes before he located the scissors hidden behind the paint cans left over from the previous weekend, when he and Delius had helped with their neighborhood's annual Graffiti Cover-Up. When he returned to the kitchen, he found that Delius had already used a meat knife to slice open the package. A box of computer software lay upon the kitchen table, while Delius had returned to his chair, whose back was tipped against the desk. "Pedo-Hag and I have been exchanging mail about Lynch Em," he said.
"Oh?" said Johnnie vaguely. He was holding the scissors in his hands and feeling useless. "Did you reach a decision?"
"Well, Pedo-Hag mentioned several court decisions that protect the free speech of people who argue in favor of illegal activity, provided that they don't incite others to immediate action. In other words, you can't shout 'fire' in a crowded theater, but you can say, 'I think we should have the right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater.' So it appears that Lynch Em's posts aren't illegal. What it comes down to is our policy of equal treatment of BLs and non-BLs. If we allow Conscientious Objector's posts in which he advocates, in theory, that boylovers should have illegal sex with boys, then we have to allow Lynch Em's posts in which he advocates, in theory, that non-peds should engage in vigilante violence against boylovers."
Johnnie dropped the scissors with a thud onto the table and reseated himself on the swivel chair, wrapping his legs around the back. "Paul isn't Lynch Em," he said shortly.
"I never said he was."
"Yet you've told me that I mustn't let him visit me."
"I never said that either. It's none of my business who you invite to your home. All I'm saying is that, if you give Paul your address, I won't be able to visit your apartment again. I can't run the risk of meeting a CBF participant in the hallway who might realize that I'm Gold Star."
"This is because Paul isn't a boylover."
"Not necessarily. If you'd invited At Peace to your place, I'd have said the same. You're one of only two people who knows my real-life identity, Johnnie; you know that."
Johnnie picked with furious concentration at a frayed thread on the seat back. "Gods, Delius, this is ridiculous. For you to stop seeing me just because a third person from the boards might guess who you are"
"You can still come see me."
"And what if I don't want to waste my time visiting a hermit who spends his entire life hiding in a black room?"
His voice shook with anger, and his eyes were watering with rage. It took him a bit to realize that Delius had risen and left the room by way of the door leading to his hallway. For a moment, Johnnie looked longingly toward the door leading to the fire escape. But his laptop was still on, and it would take too much bother to shut it down before leaving. He got up and walked toward the hallway.
Delius was sitting in his bedroom in front of his laptop; the colors on his face turned from blue to yellow to green as he skipped from board to board. He didn't look up as Johnnie leaned against the doorpost. After a minute spent trying to battle back his aching anger, Johnnie said, "Look, I didn't mean to say that, but you're asking me to choose between you and Paul; that's not fair. If you'd only stop being so paranoid"
"Jesus Christ in hell, Johnnie! When you've had a firebomb go off in your apartment, then you can pass judgment upon me!"
Delius pushed himself back from the desk so abruptly that the table tilted. The laptop skidded into the air and landed on the floor with a crash, sparking before going dead. Standing by the desk, Delius looked down and swore, but made no move to pick up the machine.
Johnnie stood frozen in the doorway, like a figure trapped in ice. "You didn't tell me that happened to you."
Delius pushed his hair out of his eyes. With his gaze still fixed upon the remains of the laptop, he said wearily, "That's why I had to move last winter. That's also the real reason why Brick wouldn't room with me. The police caught the guy who did it, but a number of peds in this state have been targetted like that during the past few years. The police couldn't guarantee that it wouldn't happen to me again." He raised his head; the bedroom was too dark to reveal his expression. "I should have told you two months ago that you were putting yourself at risk by even visiting me. I'm sorry."
"You told me at the start that you were on the registry; I knew there was a danger. But gods, Delius . . ."
Delius emitted a sigh so heavy that it stirred the dust floating in a tiny shaft of light from the curtained window. He walked toward the door. Johnnie stepped aside to let him pass, and as he did so, he saw again the silver mark across Delius's left arm. He remembered then the missing furniture, the new books and posters to replace the old, the sooty prison records and the burnt binder. The coldness reached Johnnie's stomach; he had to swallow back the sickness.
Delius had begun to walk toward the library. Now he turned round in the afternoon light of the hallway. Small droplets of sweat clung to his forehead like stars against the sky.
"Johnnie, I'm terrified of anyone finding out I'm a boylover," he said quietly. "If you don't understand that about me, you won't understand anything. You'd need to have been there on the day that six of them pinned me to the floor, and even as I screamed from their blows, I knew that the prison guards would react twice as slowly as they would for anyone else. I was sure I'd be dead before help came. . . . I'd like to think that things are better out here in so-called civilized society, but even before the fire, the articles I read at the news sites told me otherwise. Every time I get a package from a person I don't know, my hands shake as I open it, because I'm afraid it's a letter bomb from someone else who has seen my name on the sex offender registry and has decided that people like me don't deserve to live. Every time the phone rings, I jump, because I'm afraid it's that child advocate with a hit list, who is checking that my phone number and address are current before he posts Gold Star's real-life information on his Website, so that other vigilantes can find me. Every time you knock on the door, my heart pounds, because I'm afraid the police have discovered that I'm Webmaster of Crossroads, and they've come to take me to the same sort of windowless room where they took Brick, only I'm not going to emerge from that room alive."
Johnnie tried to will some warmth into his body, which was standing directly in the sunlight shared by Delius. He remembered a post that Pedo-Hag had written, about the different layers of a person. Now, staring at the self-assured Webmaster with the straight carriage and the head held high, Johnnie glimpsed beneath that image a different Gold Star, one whom he had not imagined existed.
His vision was gone almost at once, leaving him standing in front of the man who always clicked his mouse with unwavering confidence. Groping for the image he had lost, Johnnie said, "Thank you for having told me who you were."
Suddenly Delius's smile was back, like a star that has been occluded and then returned to its former shining glory. "Well, you were worth the risk," he said lightly. "I just don't think Paul is."
The phone in the kitchen rang. Delius gave an almost imperceptible start. For a moment his eyes linked with Johnnie's; then he brushed past Johnnie and hurried into the kitchen.
By the time Johnnie reached him, Delius was listening intently into the receiver. "Jesus, yes thanks, Brick," he said, then slammed the receiver down and leaped toward his chair like a fireman responding to a three-alarm fire. "Lynch Em did a Web search on some of Conscientious Objector's favorite phrases and found C.O.'s home page, which has his real-life name," he announced as he turned on the computer and tapped his fingers impatiently on the mouse. "He has outed C.O. and is posting no-text 'kill the perverts' messages all over the board. You delete the outing message; I'm going to ban Lynch Em's IP address."
Silence descended upon the room again. Nothing could be heard but the soft click of keys, the softer click of the computer mice, and, far away, the upraised voice of a boy on the street.
* * *
Johnnie looked down at the envelope, with its return address in the neat handwriting that his mother not trusting his second-grade teacher in so important a matter had patiently drilled into him. First name. Last name. Street address. City, state, zip. There was a certain finality about it all that made him uneasy.
All around him was the heavy hum of the building's circulation system. Johnnie distracted himself by picking up a stray paper clip, placing the paper clip in his left pocket, where he always put objects that he was uncertain what to do with. Half the time he ended up tossing the objects out without looking at them again, an apt symbol for his native indecisiveness. He looked down at the envelope again.
He was still staring at the envelope a minute later when the door opened and a man in a clerical collar said, "Are you looking for Paul?"
Johnnie, who had not yet knocked at the door, nearly dropped the envelope. Quickly he pressed it against his thigh, address inward, as he said, "No, I was just dropping something off."
"I see. I thought you might not know that Paul spends Sunday afternoons with a friend of his."
Something about the way that the minister phrased this sentence caused Johnnie to say spontaneously, "You mean his girlfriend. Don't you believe that Paul's ex-gay, then?"
The minister, still holding the door of the administrative office wide open, hesitated. He was younger than Paul, perhaps thirty, but with a certain gentle firmness to his voice that Johnnie instinctively associated with mentoring. He had in his hand a Post-It note that he had evidently been about to place in Paul's office.
"I wouldn't want to draw any conclusions about Paul," the minister said slowly, "but I've known other cases of this kind where the person in question was, at most, a bisexual struggling with heavy feelings of guilt. It's one thing, you know, to make ethical decisions about sexual behavior. It's quite another to deny the truth of one's sexual orientation."
From where Johnnie stood, he could see Paul's chair, and he remembered Paul as he had seen him on their first meeting, his face aflame with joy as he talked of his entrance into the ex-gay community. Speaking as slowly as the minister had, Johnnie said, "In a way, I'd agree, but as far as Paul's concerned . . . I guess there are different paths in life one can take, and sometimes a friend will choose a path that I wouldn't choose. I'm not sure that's always wrong."
It was the minister's silence that alerted him to the fact that he had spoken too freely. Trying to ignore the feeling that he should seek out the nearest incinerator and throw into it the envelope in his hand, Johnnie took a step backwards, saying, "I should be going . . ."
"Must you?" The minister's voice was matter-of-fact. "I have an evening service in a short while, but if you'd care to stay either attending the service or waiting here, if you prefer we could talk some more. You've hit on my favorite topic, as it happens: the necessity of coming to terms with what we are."
"Thanks." The ball in Johnnie's throat bobbed as he swallowed. "That's kind of you. But I need to be going. Maybe I'll see you some other time."
"I hope so." Without pressing the matter, the minister turned away and walked over to Paul's desk, where he picked up a pen.
Johnnie retreated, waiting until he had passed through the exit doors of the administrative building before he allowed himself to breathe again. He looked down at the envelope. It was crumpled in his hand. Carefully, he folded it and placed it in his left pocket, then began to walk across the campus toward the subway stop.
It occurred to him as he did so that the minister's words which the minister no doubt believed had a simple meaning could have been spoken by anyone he knew on the boylove boards, from Conscientious Objector to Concerned & Angry. He found himself imagining what the minister would have said if he had realized the full complexity of what Johnnie had to "come to terms" with.
He had nearly finished the imaginary scene when he passed through the subway turnstile. It was then that, with a shock, Johnnie recognized the path he had just chosen not to take.
For the rest of the journey home, he found himself wondering whether his decision would have been different if he had not been friends with Gold Star.
* * *
I need help
Posted at Crossroads by True Boylover on Sunday, June 3,
at 11:59 PM
Please, I hope somebody here can help me. You see, the rape and murder fantasies have come back I don't know why, except maybe because things are still difficult at work, and B and I have been feeling a lot of pressure in trying to keep secret our love for each other.
Things were so bad for me on Friday that I left work early and called Jeff. He drove right down from [deleted by moderator] and stayed all weekend with me. He has been trying for a month now to get me into sex offender therapy, but all of the groups require that you have been arrested for a sex offense, and of course, I haven't!
Jeff did find a mental hospital that was willing to take me, but that would mean being locked up behind barred windows, and I just couldn't stand the thought of that. So I asked Jeff to keep trying.
Jeff had to go back to the city this evening. He wanted me to come with him, but I can't afford to lose my job on top of everything else. He made me promise to call him before work, after work, and twice in the evening, just so that he'd know that I was still okay. If I don't call him and don't answer my home phone, he'll come check on me.
All of this is going to make it a little hard for me to see B this week. I finally told Jeff about how B and I love each other. (I had a hard time deciding whether to do so, because half of you guys thought I should and half of you guys thought I shouldn't.) Jeff was very much worried and told me I should stop seeing B at once. But honestly, guys, B's the only thing keeping me sane!
I wish that I had someone other than Jeff and B to talk with about these things. You guys have been really great about sending me encouraging e-mail, and a couple of you have even called me, but it's just not the same as talking with someone face-to-face.
I'm posting this at all of the boards not just BoyChat because I'm hoping that one of you can find the time to visit me. My address is [deleted]. If anyone here lives near me, please, please come see me. Jeff and even B can only understand so much; I need another boylover to talk to.
Love,
True Boylover (really, I'm TRYING)
[Moderator's note: Crossroads participants are reminded that the Crossroads Committee discourages posts in which participants out themselves. Adult participants who wish to meet each other in real life should make arrangements for such meetings by e-mail. The Crossroads Committee recommends that participants show appropriate caution before agreeing to such meetings. Gold Star)
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