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Twenty Thousand Gold Stars

A Novel About an Internet Community

By Dusk Peterson

Author's Note

The events and characters in the novel are fictional. However, the events are representative of the sorts of activities that have taken place in the community, while the tremendous variety of viewpoints expressed by the characters are drawn from reality.

One difficulty in writing a novel about a large and varied group of people is that the novelist generally only has the opportunity to show one or two examples of each "type." Because of this, it is important for me to stress that none of my depictions of the characters who represent particular groups are intended to suggest that all members of the group share the views expressed by my characters. In some cases, other members of the group may be strongly opposed to the views expressed.

Although it should not be necessary to preface a work of fiction by saying this, I would like to emphasize that the opinions expressed by the characters are their own and are not necessarily shared by me.

The novel's scattered legal references do not correspond to the laws in any particular jurisdiction but are intended to give a general sense of the current legal situation in many parts of the United States.

Careful readers will observe that this story is set in the time period immediately before the present wave of communication devices – such as cell phones and PDAs – became widespread. Likewise, the community's customs are drawn from that era.

Twenty Thousand Gold Stars is the result of three years of research and over three thousand hours' worth of conversations at these boards. During the time I studied this community as a journalist, I asked a number of hard, soul-searching questions; I also asked a number of ignorant questions. My questions were almost invariably responded to with patience and courtesy. I would like to thank the many people – members of the community, sympathetic visitors, and visitors who oppose the community – who have shared their stories with me over the years; at times this sharing was a painful experience for them. I am very much in their debt.
 

Epigraph

Ged stood still a while, like one who has received great news, and must enlarge his spirit to receive it. It was a great gift that Vetch had given him, the knowledge of his true name.

No one knows a man's true name but himself and his namer. He may choose at length to tell it to his brother, or his wife, or his friend, yet even those few will never use it where any third person may hear it. In front of other people they will, like other people, call him by his use-name, his nickname – such a name as Sparrowhawk, and Vetch, and Ogion which means "fir-cone". If plain men hide their true name from all but a few they love and trust utterly, so much more must wizardly men, being more dangerous, and more endangered.

—Ursula K. Le Guin: A Wizard of Earthsea

Chapter One

Home Page

The color shining upon his face at that moment was green: he was bent over the laptop, looking at a Website with a pasture-green background. At the top of the site was a logo showing a signpost with markers pointing in two different directions. Beside the logo was a single word: "Crossroads."

He glanced down at the subject headings of each message on the message board. Ignoring the subject heading that read, "DEATH IS TOO GOOD FOR YOU," he instead stared at the message just above this, entitled, "You are sick! You need help!" It had been posted by someone named Concerned & Angry.

He moved his computer mouse with his hand until the screen's arrow lay over the subject heading that linked to the message; then he used the mouse to click on the link. The opening words of the post flashed onto his screen.

* * *

You are sick! You need help!
Posted at Crossroads by Concerned & Angry on Wednesday, February 28, at 8:36 PM

I mean it. All of you people are really, really sick, and you need professional help. Please get it before you hurt any more—

* * *

At that moment, like a path suddenly diverging, he caught a flicker of movement beyond the computer screen. He leaned forward to see better.

The movement came from outside. Through the window, he could see the bright neon light of the Art Deco marquee, and below it, two figures hurrying along, their coats swishing under the force of the wind. They were both carrying plastic bags, and as he watched, the wind blew one of the bags against a drainpipe that was sticking out from the streetside wall of the movie theater. The plastic tore, and the groceries tumbled.

He moved with an instinct he did not even fully know he possessed, like a fireman who has trained himself so well to respond to an alarm that he is out of bed from his sleep before his mind fully grasps that the alarm has rung. Pausing only to grab an empty plastic bag sitting on the kitchen counter near the door, he rushed out of the apartment, ran down the flight of stairs, and crashed open the door to the street.

The figures were on their knees now, trying to collect the scattered groceries. A magazine lifted itself out of the grasp of one of the figures and blew away into the dark. The taller figure, pausing to put his books down on the sidewalk, said something to the smaller figure, who gave an exclamation of frustration as she attempted to fit cereal boxes into the remaining bags.

So absorbed were they in their task that they did not notice him until he was at their side. Leaning toward the smaller figure, who was dusting off a can of frozen orange juice, he asked, "Will this help?"

He held out the plastic bag he had brought. As he did so, the smaller figure gave a screech that she truncated as she looked up and saw who was standing over her. Placing her hand against her heart, she said breathlessly, "Good lord, John, you frightened me! I'd just been reading an article about the FBI's hunt for sexual predators, and for a moment I thought you were a rapist."

"Sorry." He knew that his smile was overly rigid, but he couldn't seem to relax. "I shouldn't have crept up on you like that when it was so late." As he spoke, he dropped onto his knees and began placing a can of cocoa in the bag.

From this vantage point, he could see better the middle-aged woman kneeling on the sidewalk, her coat fluttering open in the wind. Used as he was to seeing Sandra in business suits, it was startling to view her in a lycra blouse that outlined her full breasts and her narrow waist. Without looking down further to see whether her bottom was just as shapely, he said, "You're out late."

"Yes, it's so frustrating. I told Kim that if he wanted to drive Milano and me home from the school play, he'd need to be there at eight p.m. sharp, because I had a bunch of groceries I needed to get home. It's not as though I was forcing him to drive us; he volunteered for the task. And then, of course, he didn't turn up."

Sandra flashed him a smile. She was wearing lipstick the color of ripe grapes, and her eyelashes were delicately darkened to emphasize her olive eyelids and bark-brown eyes. He tried to ignore the growing stirring within him, instead saying, "Do you have far to walk? I'm afraid I don't have a car, but I'd be glad to help you carry the groceries back."

"Gosh, that's sweet of you, John, but we don't have far to go at all. We're just headed for the subway stop at the end of the block, and our house is right around the corner from the stop at the other end of the line. There's really no need for you to trouble yourself."

As she rose, though, she made no move to take the bag from his hand. He said, "It's no trouble at all; I'll be glad to walk to the subway with you. Here, let me take that bag." He reached over and took the paper bag from the taller figure, who was struggling to balance it on top of his pile of books.

"Why, thank you, John. If you don't mind . . ." She handed one of the bags to the taller figure, reserving the bigger of the plastic bags for herself. "To be honest, I'm a bit nervous about us walking alone at this time of night. I know that the subway here is safe, but you never can tell what might be lurking on dark streets like this."

"It's a dangerous world," he agreed. They were walking side by side down the street now, passing late-night couples holding hands. Groping for conversation, he stared down into the bag and said, "Safety locks. Outlet covers. Anti-scalding devices. You seem to take child safety seriously."

"I do my best," she said brightly. "Of course, it's hard taking care of three of them, with no one to help. I can't tell you what I went through tonight to find a babysitter."

"Oh, yes?" It was an opening, but he decided to let it pass. His gaze was on her left hand, with its bright red fingernails and its ringless fourth finger. "You don't get much help from Kim, then?"

She snorted. "You saw how much help he was tonight. He lives in the suburbs, but I swear, he might as well live on the West Coast for all the help he gives. Not that I expect any help for me, but they are his children. He didn't divorce them when he divorced me."

"Perhaps," he suggested tentatively, "you can find someone else to help you."

He was a bit nervous that he'd been too bold, but she accepted the suggestion immediately, saying, "Yes, I often feel there ought to be another male figure in our lives – for the children's sake, you understand. Milano is especially in need of a male figure."

He decided that it was time he directed his attention toward the tall figure trailing behind him. He turned his head for the first time to look, and as he did so, a jolt went through him.

It took him a moment to realize that he had stopped dead on the sidewalk. By that time, Sandra was at his elbow, saying, "You haven't met Milano before, have you, John? Honey, this is Mr. Steadman, who works in the department next to me. —Oh, lord, is that a taxi? Hold on here, guys, I'll go check." She left them standing together, buffeted by the hard wind.

Johnnie felt a wild impulse to whirl and grab hold of Sandra, which he carefully curbed. Instead he remained stiffly where he was, hoping that the hair being blown over his eyes from the wind hid some of his expression. There was an awkward moment of silence.

"I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Steadman." The words, spoken in the tone of a youth whose voice is starting to crack, were flat. The boy's expression was stoic. After a moment more, he realized why and cursed himself inwardly.

It was too late now to pretend that he hadn't been staring. Resisting the impulse to look back at Sandra, who was carrying out an excited conversation with a cabdriver in an unlit taxi, he put forward his hand and said, "Call me Johnnie."

Milano took his hand and shook it in a perfunctory manner before dropping it. He looked as though he was having to make a strenuous effort to keep from ducking his head. As it was, the light from the approaching subway stop fell full upon his face, emphasizing the bulge in the left cheek, the involuntary twist of the mouth next to that bulge, and the blue-black mark that darkened most of the left half of the face.

Realizing that he was staring again, Johnnie looked hastily down at the books. "Are those your scripts for the school play? Your father's an actor, isn't he?"

"I wasn't in the school play." Again the voice emerged flat. Then something closer to an emotion came to the surface as the boy added, "They didn't accept my audition."

For a minute, Johnnie was at a loss for what to say. He moved aside to make way for a giggling teenage couple that was walking by, hand in hand. As he did so, Sandra came into view again. Her hands were tracing patterns in the air while she excitedly told the taxi driver what she thought of him. As Johnnie watched, she flung her head back, so that her long dark hair streamed back like a banner.

"That happened to me too," said Johnnie finally. "I had my heart set on playing Romeo and climbing up the balcony to hold secret conversations with Juliet, but the school director didn't think I was convincing enough in the scene where I described how I was going to defy my family. I suppose I was a bit too conventional as a teenager. I was miserable until I found other school projects to occupy me. Are those textbooks, then?" He nearly stepped forward to look closer at the titles, which would have brought him out of view of Sandra, but he stopped himself in time.

"Yeah," said the boy, in a voice closer to normal. "Geometry."

Sandra, whose presence he had never ceased to be aware of, suddenly spun away from the taxi, shouted back at the driver a round of invectives, and stomped over to where Johnnie and her son stood. "Filthy bastard," she announced, glaring at Johnnie. Then, seeing his look of alarm, she added, "I mean the taxi driver. I offered him twenty bucks extra to drive us home, but no, he'd rather see us struggle with our groceries. Good Samaritans are hard to find these days." She rewarded him with another of her bright smiles. "What are you guys talking about?"

"The horrors of math homework," Johnnie replied.

"Oh, lord, Milano, I hope you weren't talking about how much you hate math," she said. "Mr. Steadman is an accountant, you know. He majored in math in college."

Johnnie was momentarily startled until he remembered that, as an executive assistant, Sandra had access to his company records. Then he felt uneasy, as though his records could have told more about him than he wanted anyone to know. To distract himself from this thought, he said to Milano, "School math can be really boring. It all depends on how it's taught."

"I suppose so," said Milano cautiously. "My seventh-grade teacher was better at explaining things than the one I've got this year."

"I know some books you could read on your own that would help in learning geometry." He was acutely conscious of the woman standing next to him; he could smell her perfume.

"Maybe you could bring them over to our place and show him them," suggested Sandra. "You deserve a home-cooked dinner for rescuing us tonight."

"Mama makes a terrific lasagna," agreed Milano. He was looking now from Johnnie to Sandra, as though weaving a connection in his mind.

"Well," said Johnnie, feeling his heart pound, "perhaps we can set something up some time. I'd better be getting back to my apartment, though. I was busy with some work."

"Thanks for your help, Mr. Steadman," said Milano as he took the bags from Johnnie. He was only two inches shorter than Johnnie, having reached one of those spurts of early adolescence.

"Yes, thank you, John," said Sandra, smiling at him as she took from her son the plastic bag Johnnie had brought. "I'll see you at work tomorrow?"

"Of course," replied Johnnie. He hoped his voice sounded normal. His heart was pounding so hard now that it was difficult to tell.

He watched them until they had disappeared down the escalator into the subway; then he turned. A man was walking down the opposite side of the street, in the shadow of the buildings. His gaze had been upon the woman and boy, but it flicked over to Johnnie for a brief moment before the man turned to walk into an alley next to the building at the corner. Johnnie felt his breath tighten as he wondered how much the man had seen. He wondered too how much the man had guessed.

He often wondered that.

He felt something brush against his leg. Looking down, he saw a bedraggled magazine travelling down the street from the direction of the movie theater. He scooped up the magazine, saw that it was the one that had belonged to Sandra, and was trying to decide whether to toss it into the garbage can nearby when his eyes caught sight of the headline. "Sexual Predators," the cover said. "How Can We Protect Ourselves From Them?"

He felt a chill go through him then, removing all the warmth that he had begun to feel while talking with Sandra. For a moment more, he stared down at the cover. Then, remembering the curious man, he carefully rolled up the magazine so that its cover was hidden, stuffed it into his left pocket, and made his way back down the wind-tempestuous street.

* * *

His apartment was black but for the glow from the marquee. Johnnie paused to turn on lights at the kitchen end of his efficiency, then walked over to the darker end of the room, where the computer waited, outlined against the theater lights. Tossing the magazine onto the desk, he sat down and moved the mouse. Concerned & Angry's post returned to the screen.

* * *

You are sick! You need help!
Posted at Crossroads by Concerned & Angry on Wednesday, February 28, at 8:36 PM

I mean it. All of you people are really, really sick, and you need professional help. Please get it before you hurt any more children.

I am one of those "evil" CAs (child advocates) that you men complain about all the time. I help heal children from the wounds inflicted on them by predators, I fight to give children the right to live a life free from violence and abuse, and yes, I track down you sexual predators – oh, excuse me, you "boylovers." I mustn't be politically incorrect.

Let me tell you what "boylove" is like from the perspective of the boy. When my son was nine, he was befriended by one of you "boylovers." During that time, my husband and I were separated; you predators always target kids from broken homes. When a family friend offered to serve as a male figure in my son's life, I was naive enough to think he was doing it out of the goodness of his heart, rather than for his own selfish lusts. I entrusted my son to him, and I've never ceased to regret what I did or to warn other parents against the dangers of "boylovers."

My son loved one of you with all his heart, and you rewarded that by taking advantage of his innocence and scarring him over and over, as though you were beating him bloody. He's twenty-six now, and he still can't talk fully about what happened; it hurts him too much. But I remember the first time he came and told me. I remember how he cried and said, "Why is he doing this to me, Mommy? I thought he loved me!"

So that's what "boylove" really is – molesting and discarding and abandoning boys – and that's why I fight against "boylove" organizations such as NAMBLA and Free Spirits and Crossroads. I want a world where no more boys and girls will endure what my son endured.

I read below the post by Lynch Em, suggesting that non-pedophiles should murder all pedophiles. I can't agree with that sort of sentiment at all; I think that only continues the cycle of violence that you pedophiles began. I've met recovering offenders, and I know that some of you can be helped. You just need to get yourself off of these "boylove" boards and go into therapy! Once you do, you'll be able to keep yourself from hurting any more children.

I'd urge you to call your local police and turn yourselves in, or, if you haven't committed a rape yet, to call your local child abuse center and ask for information on sex addiction groups. That's the only way a "boylover" can ever truly love a boy.

CA stands for Concerned & Angry

* * *

Johnnie reread the message twice, feeling the tension grow in his body each time he did. After a moment, he pushed his chair away and walked over to the refrigerator.

He returned several minutes later, holding a glass of apple juice and a dinner-for-one carton of microwaved lasagna. He sat down at the desk and ate half the tasteless noodles before moving the mouse again.

The "back" button took him to the main index of Crossroads. The page automatically reloaded itself, showing him that two messages had been posted in reply to Concerned & Angry's message, one of them since the first time that he had looked at the index. He clicked the mouse on the link to the earliest reply, his left hand reaching automatically for the apple juice.

* * *

Take your blinders off, ma'am
Posted at Crossroads by Conscientious Objector on Wednesday, February 28, at 9:17 PM
In reply to You are sick! You need help! posted by Concerned & Angry

So your son didn't like making love to a man. Big deal. I'm sorry for your son, CA, just as I'm sorry for friends of mine who get divorced, but just because half of American marriages end in divorce doesn't mean we should outlaw the institution of marriage. (At least, not for that reason alone. More on this in later posts.)

If you're as educated about boylove as you pretend to be, then you should know that the best meta-study done of this subject – a study that collated the findings of 59 other studies, most of them done by scientists who oppose man-boy sex – showed that, on average, one-third of boys react negatively to man-boy sex. That's one-third in a world so hostile to the concept of boylove that your child advocacy sites talk about boylovers like Plato and Michelangelo as "sexual predators."

Your son may have been (I say "may" because I'll believe it when I hear it from his own lips) one of the boys who didn't enjoy making love to a man. Well, it happens; I don't enjoy making love to women myself. (By the way, you haven't explained why your son didn't simply tell the boylover, "No, thank you." Any true boylover will take no for an answer.) So your son and some boys like him would rather not have sex with a man. But what about the perspective of other boys?

Let me match your son's story with my own. When I was twelve years old, I became lovers with a man in my neighborhood. It was my idea that we engage in bed-play, and it took me two years to convince the man to see things my way. (Yes, that means I fell for the man when I was a prepubescent. It happens.) We were lovers for five years, and no, we didn't tell my parents, any more than I tell my parents now about the men I go to bed with. They're Oral Roberts Moral Majority; they wouldn't understand.

So we were lovers for five years, and then he "discarded" me. Yeah, right. I told him that my sexual interests had turned elsewhere (namely, to the younger boys in the neighborhood). He was disappointed, but of course he let me go.

So then he "abandoned" me. This "abandonment" consisted of him and me exchanging phone calls nearly every night for thirty-five years. My lover is now seventy-one years old, and I have a standing invitation to join him and his family – especially his gorgeous grandkids :) – for Thanksgiving, New Year's, and Fourth of July. We love each other as much as we did when I was a child, even though we don't have sex with each other any more.

Lest you think that I'm not an objective observer as to the effects of boylove on a boy, let me tell you about a remark made by my sister, who is (to my great regret) a pro-life Republican Christian who has "family values" written all over her. Last year she asked my lover to be mentor to her youngest (very cute) boy. My lover warned her that he was attracted to the boy and that, if the boy requested to enter into an affair with my lover, my lover wouldn't object.

My sister's response? "If that happens and my son ends up as fine a man as [insert my real name here], I'll be very pleased indeed."

Now, I know the standard response you "child advocates" make to stories like this. I was "brainwashed" as a child; I was really abused but just don't know it. With the help of the therapists that you inflict on loved boys, you can aid the boys to see how much they suffered at the hands of "sexual predators" like my lover.

People like you can twist the evidence to say anything you want. We're not the sick ones, ma'am. You are.

Conscientious Objector, because I won't be party to injustice against boys who are deprived of the right to choose whom they want to love

* * *

Johnnie spilled the apple juice as he set down the glass. Hastily he moved the mouse away from the spill and mopped the liquid up with a paper tissue. Then he carried the glass, fork, and empty carton over to the counter before opening the refrigerator again.

He returned to the desk bearing a piece of the apple cake baked for him by his mother in honor of his thirty-fourth birthday. Absentmindedly spreading the whipped cream with his fork, he read the second reply to Concerned & Angry's post.

* * *

Welcome to Crossroads!
Posted at Crossroads by Pedo-Hag on Wednesday, February 28, at 9:23 PM
In reply to You are sick! You need help! posted by Concerned & Angry

Welcome to your new home. :) (The symbol at the end of the sentence is a smiley face, in case you're not familiar with Internet jargon.)

I'm Pedo-Hag, Co-Webmaster of Crossroads. I'm a single female, twenty-two years of age, and I've never been attracted to children. In addition to my duties here, I also run a forum for survivors of incest abuse. I was molested by my father when I was a teenager.

Sometimes reading the posts here sickens me, especially when they're about incest. I remember that, after a long thread one day in which some of the participants here calmly discussed whether parent-child sex is beneficial to the child, I had to go offline and cry for an hour. But then I came back. As calmly as I could, I posted a message recounting (for the benefit of those who hadn't already heard it) the tale of what happened between me and my father. Afterwards several of the boylovers here said that I had changed their views on parent-child sex.

That's why I spend so much time helping at this board – because I know that stories like yours and mine can change the views of boylovers and help them to act more responsibly.

When I first arrived at the boylove boards, I was just as angry as you are. I yelled at the people here, asking them how they could hurt children. Gradually I realized that some of the people here have never abused a child, some have abused a child but regretted it afterwards, and some are abusing children now but don't realize this. I've never met a man here (we've had only one female boylover here during my time) who deliberately hurt a child. If you explain to them why adult-child sex hurts children, and they're able to take to heart what you say, then they're eager to help stop the abuse.

That's why I hope you'll keep posting here, so that we can learn from your story, just as I've learned from the stories of the boylovers I've met here.

Oh, by the way, another child advocate nicknamed me Pedo-Hag because I spend so much time with boylovers. It's a label I wear with pride.

Pedo-Hag
Co-Webmaster
Crossroads

* * *

Johnnie was beginning to grow cold. He stood up, turned on the apartment heat and then stared awhile at the lamplit street below. The street was empty; the evening show for the theater was not yet near its end, and no line had started for the late show. He returned to his computer and pulled up his Web browser's bookmarks page.

Crossroads was the third bookmark on the list. He clicked on the second bookmark. A sun-yellow page appeared; a logo with a blue triangle behind a cross shone out from the screen.

He scrolled down the page and saw that there had only been one new post there since the previous night. Seeing the subject heading, he hesitated, then clicked open the message, clicking his way down the replies in the thread of messages.

* * *

Are you Christians? Or are you boylovers?
Posted at the Christian Boylove Forum by A Visitor on Wednesday, February 28, at 11:30 AM

I hope you won't mind if I ask this question. If this forum is closed to outsiders, just let me know and I'll leave. I don't want to break any rules here, but I'm genuinely puzzled as to how you can call yourselves Christian boylovers. If you're Christian, you must know that the Bible forbids us to enter into sexual relationships outside the bonds of marriage, and even if you're pro-gay, you must know that Jesus condemned the abuse of children. So either you're Christian or you're boylovers. I don't see how you can be both.

Please understand that I realize you can struggle with the temptation to abuse children. Many of us struggle with sexual temptations; Jesus himself was tempted by Satan. Temptation itself is not a sin, but I don't see how you can allow yourselves to act on your temptations and then go up to the communion rail on Sundays as though nothing has happened.

Again, if I'm out of place in asking this, please do let me know. I'll be praying for you in any case.

Of course you can post here!
Posted at the Christian Boylove Forum by At Peace on Wednesday, February 28, at 7:48 PM
In reply to Are you Christians? Or are you boylovers? posted by A Visitor

First of all, let me welcome you here, brother. "Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them," promised Jesus, and I see that there are at least two of us here tonight :)

Yes, of course you can post here. This forum is open to everyone, no matter what their orientation or creed. You don't say whether or not you're attracted to children yourself, but we've had pedophiles in the sexual recovery community participate here, as well as a number of non-pedophiles. Non-Christians have also posted here on occasion. One of them, White Rose, is a regular participant at the moment.

As for myself, I belong to an evangelical church and have lived for all of my forty-plus years in a Christian community: a small Midwestern town full of fellowship and communion.

Brother, you have no idea how much it warmed me to read your words and to know that you understand our struggles. We're not as far apart from each other as you may have thought. Like you, I believe that God wants us to reserve sexual activity for the holy bonds of marriage. Like you, I believe that homosexual and pedophilic behavior are sinful (though by no means the worst sins; hardening one's heart against the Holy Spirit is far more sinful).

That is why I and many other here post at this forum: because we are struggling to abide by God's laws, and because we need each other's help to battle against sexual temptation and to find ways in which we can put our orientation to a godly use. I do not believe, as some others here do, that God made me a boylover. I believe that my sexual desire for young boys is a result of the Fall, in which all of nature became captive to the evil that came into our world when the first man and woman sinned. But neither do I believe – and it is clear to me from your words that you share my views on this – that I am an enemy of God because I find myself to be attracted to boys. I was blessed by God with free will, and I have used my free will (with the help of God's grace) to prevent myself from abusing any children. I am a sinner, of course, as all humans are, but I have not committed that particular sin.

But just a failure to act – refraining from having sex with a boy – is not enough for me. I believe deeply that Satan can only bring about evil by twisting that which is essentially good, and I have faith that God can help me to recover the good that Satan has tried to twist. Behind my sinful desire to have sex with boys is a true love for boys that I believe I can use to bring good into the lives of the boys around me. Of course I have to show caution, just as a man who is attracted to a married woman must be cautious about permitting himself to enter into situations where he might commit adultery. But with the support of the other participants here, I have been able to help many of the boys in my community in nonsexual ways that allow me to share with them the love of God. So what might have been a tragedy for me has instead become a blessing from God. Christ has allowed me to suffer and be tempted as he once was, and has also given me the strength I need to help build his Kingdom upon earth.

Please do write more and tell us about your own sexual struggles. I'm sure that everyone here would benefit from your story.

In Christ's Name,
At Peace with the Lord
Webmaster of CBF

I'm glad to be here
Posted at the Christian Boylove Forum by Paul on Wednesday, February 28, at 8:46 PM
In reply to Of course you can post here! posted by At Peace

I'd like to apologize for my earlier post. Obviously I should have read the messages on this board before posting. I had only heard the word "boylove" in connection with NAMBLA, and I hadn't realized that you were using the word "boylove" in a different sense. Of course if the type of love you are trying to exercise is agapé, then you truly are boy-lovers. I'd just caution you that the word could be easily misunderstood, since in our society "lover" usually has an erotic meaning.

Thank you for inviting me to take part here; I would indeed like to do so now that I understand your purpose. I'm sure that you can be of as much help to me as I hope I can be to others here.

> You don't say whether or not you're attracted to children yourself

I'm sorry; I ought to have introduced myself. My name is Paul, I'm 46, and I've been attracted to other males since my late teens. I belong to an ex-gay ministry, and though I have not yet experienced the shift in feelings that some of the other members have, I am dating a woman from my church, and we remain hopeful that matters will change as I grow closer to the Lord.

In my adulthood, nearly all of my same-gender attractions have been to men my own age, but when I was a twenty-one-year-old senior in college, I was attracted to a seventeen-year-old freshman, so I suppose that you could call me an honorary ex-boylover (using the word "boylover" in the NAMBLA sense).

So you see, I'm the last person who would want to judge a fellow Christian who is trying to withstand sexual temptation. A number of my ex-gay friends are minor-attracted, and in fact I stumbled across this forum while looking for support groups for an out-of-state friend of mine (minor-attracted but not ex-gay) who is searching for a support and accountability group to help him in his journey. If anyone knows of real-life groups of this sort in the Chicago area, please let me know. I've posted my e-mail address above.

I will be praying for all of the participants at this forum, and I hope that you will pray for me as we share together our struggles.

Paul (the sinner, not the saint)

Sexual change and the Lord's purpose
Posted at the Christian Boylove Forum by At Peace on Wednesday, February 28, at 9:42 PM
In reply to I'm glad to be here posted by Paul

"And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, 'My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.' Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me." (II Corinthians 12:7-10)

Don't feel obliged to respond to my post tonight – I know that many of the participants at this board prefer to post in a more leisurely manner than at other boards – but I just wanted to express to you a concern of mine, not about your participation here, but about what you mean when you say that you are "ex-gay."

I should explain that, before I found the Christian Boylove Forum, I had spent nearly twenty years trying to rid myself of my attraction to boys by various means, including, at one point, participation in an ex-gay ministry. The effort very nearly destroyed me. Like Paul, I discovered that the Lord wanted me to continue with this "thorn" and that efforts on my part to change my sexual orientation were doomed to failure. Now, you say that you've been homosexual for over twenty years and you haven't yet changed your feelings, yet you're continuing to try to. Are you sure that this is a wise course for you to take? I don't want you to end up like I did, broken-hearted because I thought I could not serve God unless I changed my feelings.

I hope you're not offended by this post.

In Christ's Name,
At Peace with the Lord
Webmaster of CBF

I'm not offended in the least
Posted at the Christian Boylove Forum by Paul on Wednesday, February 28, at 9:51 PM
In reply to Sexual change and the Lord's purpose posted by At Peace

I'm often asked this question, naturally, and the only reply I can give is that this seems the best course for me. I know of other ex-gays whose feelings have not changed; we call ourselves "ex-gay" simply because we do not take part in the gay community. If you would prefer to call me a celibate homosexual, I don't mind at all. I'm not stuck on labels. But I do know many ex-gays whose feelings have changed, and I hope that mine will some day. Celibacy (as you yourself know) is a hard road to travel. I would like to be married.

If we're taking up too much space on this board, please feel free to e-mail me. I've linked my e-mail address again at the beginning of this post.

Paul (the sinner, not the saint)

Thank you!
Posted at the Christian Boylove Forum by At Peace on Wednesday, February 28, at 9:59 PM
In reply to I'm not offended in the least posted by Paul

Thank you for your kind explanation, Paul. I agree that all things are possible with the Lord, and I'm glad to hear that you understand that life as a celibate homosexual or a celibate boylover can be a calling from God, even if it is (and God help me, it is) hard at times.

Just a minor security matter before I let you go for the night. I notice that you've been linking to an e-mail address that reveals private information about you. For this reason I've deleted the e-mail links you've left. I urge you to get an anonymous e-mail address (I've posted a link to a page describing how you can do this), because even non-pedophiles here may be harassed by people who are not in sympathy with what the Christian Boylove Forum is doing.

Until next time—

In Christ's Name,
At Peace with the Lord
Webmaster of CBF

* * *

Johnnie drummed his fingers on the mouse for a moment, then hit the "Back" button. He ran his arrow over Paul's linked name. Sure enough, the memory cache of his browser had preserved the unedited version of Paul's post, and the e-mail address was still there: paul@chaplaincy.oldcityuniv.edu.

He hesitated a moment more, staring at the address, and then transferred the address onto an e-mail form. For a moment more, he looked at the e-mail form. Then he set it aside and returned to his bookmarks page.

The first of the bookmarked sites arrived rapidly: it had a sky-blue background, and the blue triangle logo here had no cross. The logo was not of a single blue triangle, but of a small blue triangle nestled within a large blue triangle.

Johnnie scanned rapidly through the subject headings on the message board: "I'm in love!" "Does anyone know the age of consent in New Zealand?" "News: Policeman confesses he murdered pedophile; jury acquits him." "My young friend and I go to the circus." "NAMBLA Website has posted revised U.K. child abuse law." "Survey: Is it okay to have anal sex with a boy?" "Boy in my town murdered – very sad!" "Saw a cute 5-year-old today." "I'm collecting gay youth site links." "Survey: Should we ally ourselves with girl-lovers?" "Suicide prevention resource site for boylovers seeks volunteers." "I'm new here and I need help!"

The last message already had twenty messages posted in reply. Johnnie clicked on the link.

* * *

I'm new here and I need help!
Posted at BoyChat by True Boylover on Wednesday, February 28, at 3:13 PM

Gosh, guys, I can't tell you what it means to me to find this site. I located this board while visiting a picture site, but this means FAR more to me than any pictures.

Let me introduce myself. My name is [deleted by moderator], I live in [deleted by moderator], and I graduated from high school last year. I've been attracted to boys since elementary school, but as I grow older, the boys I'm attracted to stay at elementary school age, and I guess that means I'm a boylover.

I've read some of the posts here, and I think that my story is different from that of most of the people here, which makes me scared to tell you, because I'm afraid you'll send me away. I know everyone here loves boys and doesn't want to hurt them. Well, I feel the same, but sometimes I get fantasies about raping and murdering boys. It really scares me. These fantasies started back when I was little myself, when I was going to a boarding school where I was beaten by other kids. I've been in therapy since I was ten, but I've never told my therapists about my fantasies, because I'm afraid that, under the mandatory reporting laws, they'll have to report me to the police, and I'll be locked up. The school I went to as a kid had bars in its windows, and ever since then my greatest fear has been of being locked up in a place with bars.

Right now, I'm unemployed and living away from home (it's a long story, but basically my parents found some pictures I'd been collecting of boys), so I can't afford to see a therapist. I'd really like to talk with someone about my fantasies and what I can do to stop myself from acting on them, which is why I'm so glad to have found you guys. I'm picking as my nickname "True Boylover" because that is what I'd like to be. I don't want to hurt any kids.

Is it all right for me to post here? I know that the rest of you don't want to rape kids. (I mean have forced sex with them. I guess some of you think it's okay to have sex with the boy if he wants it, but that's not what I want.) If you think I'm disgusting and a monster, all I can say is that I agree with you, and I'll go away right now if you say so.

[Name deleted by moderator], trying to be a TRUE Boylover

Welcome to BoyChat
Posted at BoyChat by Brick on Wednesday, February 28, at 3:22 PM
In reply to I'm new here and I need help! posted by True Boylover

You'll get lots of replies to your post, but I just wanted to give you official reassurance that you're more than welcome here. Anyone can post at this board, provided that they follow the BoyChat rules, which I've linked to below. Please do note what Rule #6 says about not posting anything that would imply you're engaged in illegal activity. I hope that you'll show appropriate caution in future posts.

In another matter of security, I've deleted the information in your post that tells your real name and address. Please don't post this again. Very few of us here have outed ourselves, and even those of us who have done so generally use nicknames when posting. It's just not safe to tell people that you're a boylover in this world. Anyone could read these boards and track you down to your home.

Now, a little about myself. My nickname is Brick because I sometimes feel like another brick in the wall, though BoyChat is helping me to overcome that feeling. Like most of our participants, I live in North America. I'm in my twenties, and I've been posting at BoyChat for the past three years. I'm presently Webmaster of BoyChat and head of the Free Spirits Committee, which runs BoyChat and several other boylove boards (but doesn't run independent boards such as Crossroads and the Christian Boylove Forum). Free Spirits also sponsors a Web directory of boylove-related links – but check our rules before submitting links. All sites must have legal content.

Like you, I thought of myself as a monster when I first came here. Now I don't feel at all guilty about my love of boys. Like you, I've decided to remain celibate, because I believe it's wrong to break laws even when they're unjust. I would rather put my efforts into gradually changing the world's views on boylove, in particular by serving as a model citizen myself, so that anyone who meets me and learns I'm a boylover will know that we're not monsters.

I'm sorry to hear about your fantasies of hurting kids. I've never dealt with such a problem myself, nor has anyone else I know on this board, but perhaps someone can offer you suggestions on how you can stop having these fantasies. I'm a little hesitant to recommend therapy, because a therapist I went to years ago made me hate myself so much for being a boylover that I nearly threw myself onto some railroad tracks near my house. But perhaps someone here knows of a therapist who is boylove-friendly and won't try to change your love of boys (as opposed to your desire to rape them).

Brick
Webmaster and All-Round Dogsbody
BoyChat

* * *

Other messages were posted in reply. "You are sick! You need help!" posted by Concerned & Angry. "Don't be ashamed of loving boys," by Conscientious Objector. "We're here for you, TB; talk to us," by Pedo-Hag.

When Johnnie refreshed the index of BoyChat a few minutes later, a new message had appeared.

* * *

Have you tried online sexual recovery groups?
Posted at BoyChat by White Rose on Wednesday, February 28, at 10:29 PM
In reply to I'm new here and I need help! posted by True Boylover

I know that others here will warn you about the dangers of these groups, and certainly I wouldn't recommend them for the average boylover, but it sounds to me as though you're dealing with some serious problems and could benefit from talking with people who are in recovery from having abused children. But please don't stop talking to us. We'll give you any help we can.

My name is White Rose. I'm male and am attracted to boys from ages twelve to sixteen. My AOA (age of attraction) can go a little above that and a little below, but anyone who's prepubescent or adult just doesn't attract me.

I've been a boylover since my early teens, though I didn't realize what I was until college, and I didn't know what to call myself until two months ago, when I discovered the boylove boards. (I arrived here on the solstice. Coincidentally, that's a big holiday here.)

This place has transformed my life. I no longer believe, as I once did from reading news stories, that I'm doomed to molest a child. I still haven't made up my mind on the sex issue. Some of the boylovers here think that having sex with a willing boy abuses him, some don't. But one thing I do know – and I needed to be told this – is that I'll never force a boy to have sex against his will.

It's still scary to write all of the above. I'm really a newbie like yourself, and part of me keeps screaming, "You're attracted to boys! You should be taken out and shot!" If it weren't for BoyChat, I don't know what I would have ended up doing. Probably raped and killed a child, like society expects me to. (No, I don't think I'd actually have done that, but I know some people here who were on the point of doing that and were saved by discovering BoyChat.)

I'd also like to echo what Brick said about protecting your privacy. When I first posted that I was a boylover (it was at another board, Crossroads), I mentioned which city I lived in and told what the view was outside my window. Fortunately, one of the moderators of the board edited my post to remove this information, and he even sent me an e-mail explaining that, if anyone had been reading my post who lived in my city, he might have been able to guess where I lived from what I wrote.

It's a shame that most of us can't talk with people in real life about what we are. Sometimes I'd really like to get a non-pedophile's perspective on my decisions. But I suppose I'm lucky that we have non-boylovers like Pedo-Hag who are willing to come here and talk with us.

Still, it would be nice to talk with someone in real life.

White Rose

* * *

Johnnie, suddenly restless, shut off his modem connection to the Internet before walking over to the refrigerator again. This time he took out milk and poured it into a saucepan. Placing the pan atop the stove, he turned on the gas flame and returned to the desk, where he saw at the bottom of the computer screen the icon for the unfinished letter to Paul. He clicked on the icon and looked at the e-mail form. After a moment's consideration he began to type. "My first e-mail to you," he wrote in the subject heading. Then: "Dear—"

The phone rang.

He jumped as though a bullet had entered his body. Then he reached over and picked up the receiver. "White Rose here," he said automatically.

"Johnnie?" said the voice of an older woman. "Is that you?"

"Oh, gods," Johnnie said under his breath. Then, fearing his caller had heard, he added rapidly, "Yes, it's me, Mom. Sorry about that. I was so caught up with an e-book I was reading that I guess I began to identify with one of the characters."

"White Rose, eh?" It was his father's voice, coming from the second family phone; he sounded amused. "That sounds like a spy novel. Is White Rose the secret agent?"

"Sort of," said Johnnie, twirling the phone cord around one of his fingers. "He leads a double life. He seems like an ordinary man by day, but his friends and family members don't know about the secret life he lives during the evenings."

"Ordinary office worker by day, but at night he becomes Superman." His father chuckled. "It's wonderful how those old plots stay around."

"This one's sort of updated," said Johnnie. "One of the secrets about White Rose is that he posts on the Internet, so thousands of people around the world read his posts every day, but no one in real life knows that he's White Rose."

"And does his family ever find out who he is?" This was his mother, trying, as always, to see the parents' perspective on the matter.

Johnnie was silent a moment before he said, "I'm not sure. I haven't finished the story."

"You'll have to show it to us when you come to visit next," said his father. "It sounds as though it's a rip-roaring good story, like the type of adventure stories you used to write when you were in middle school."

"I remember you telling me that it's more exciting to write about dangerous lives than to live dangerous lives," said Johnnie, abandoning the phone cord and beginning to play with the mouse. His computer screen, which had turned black when he abandoned it, leapt open again to show White Rose's post.

"That's what we're calling about, Johnnie," said his mother. "There was an article in one of the newsmagazines this week – which one was it, Tom?"

"It had a picture on its cover of a pedophile grabbing a child," his father offered.

"Yes, I'm sure you can find it at the supermarket," his mother said. "It had tips on how to keep yourself safe from crime. You know, Johnnie, we've always worried about you moving into the city among all those violent people."

"There are crimes in small towns too, Mom," said Johnnie, turning his gaze away from the post to the marquee light outside. "Last year, just a block from our house, a man was beaten up because someone thought his face matched the one on a 'Wanted' poster in the post office."

"Your mom's right, though," contributed his father. "There are special dangers in the city that we don't get as much out in the country: stalkers, predators, that sort of thing. Why it's been eight years since anyone in this town has been raped."

Johnnie suddenly felt tired. "Mom, Dad, I'd love to talk longer, but I have something on the stove that's boiling over. Could I call you in the morning?"

"Of course, Johnnie." His father's voice was understanding. "We probably shouldn't have called you this late, after you've been working all day."

"You get some rest," his mother advised. "And don't feel you have to call us in the morning. Just fit us in whenever you have the time."

"I'll phone you before work tomorrow," he assured her. "Thanks for calling."

The milk was scalded by the time he reached it; he put the pan aside to cool, then returned to the computer. The e-mail was awaiting him. He drummed his fingers, then reconnected the modem and returned to the green board.

A new reply had been posted to Concerned & Angry.

* * *

The purpose of Crossroads
Posted at Crossroads by Gold Star on Wednesday, February 28, at 10:16 PM
In reply to You are sick! You need help! posted by Concerned & Angry

Like Pedo-Hag, I'd like to welcome you to Crossroads. We don't have as many non-ped participants as we'd like, so I was glad to see your post.

I'd just like to clarify to you what the purpose of Crossroads is. You talk about NAMBLA and Free Spirits and Crossroads all in one breath, as though they were the same thing, but as I've belonged to all three organizations, I can assure you that these three groups are very different.

The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), to which I belonged for a couple of years, is an advocacy organization. Its purpose is to press for changes in society and in the law to allow underaged boys various freedoms, including the freedom to choose their own sexual partners. NAMBLA does a bit of support activity, but that's not central to its mission in the way that advocacy is.

By contrast, Free Spirits is a support organization. It aims to support all boylovers, whether or not the boylover in question believes that boys should be able to have sex with men. For example, when I was a member of the Free Spirits Committee, if a boylover had come to me and said, "I want to start a message board for boylovers who believe that it is morally wrong to have sex with boys," my reaction would have been, "Great! How can I help?" I wouldn't have said this because I believe that having sex with boys is inherently wrong (though it can be wrong under particular circumstances, such as when it is illegal). I would have said this because the Free Spirits Committee wants to help all boylovers, regardless of their ideology.

Now, Crossroads is something entirely different from NAMBLA and Free Spirits. You refer to Crossroads as a boylove organization, but in fact it is a BL/non-BL board, jointly run by boylovers and non-boylovers for the benefit of both groups. Our mission is to provide a neutral space where boylovers and non-boylovers (including non-peds) can discuss their differences and their common beliefs.

Unlike Pedo-Hag, I'm not here to change anyone's views on the sex issue. I don't think it's likely I'll change Pedo-Hag's beliefs about this any more than I think it's likely that she'll change mine. The reason I'm willing to work with her is that I believe that, despite all our differences, we both care about children and we both want a world where children will be less likely to be hurt. I'd like to work with non-peds to help create such a world, and I hope that you'll join us here at Crossroads to make your own contribution.

Maybe I can even convince you to work to prevent violence against boylovers. Okay, so I'm a dreamer. :)

Gold Star
Webmaster
Crossroads

* * *

Johnnie stared at the post for several minutes, his finger stroking the mouse indecisively. The only sound in the room was the howl of the wind against the window. Then he moved quickly, copying, pasting, and deleting until he had the e-mail in the manner that he wanted.

* * *

To: goldstar@freespirits.org
From: whiterose@anonymail.com
Date: February 28, 22:49 EST
Subject: My first e-mail to you

Dear Gold Star,

I hope you don't mind my writing you out of the blue like this. I expect that you remember my nick, since I post at Crossroads fairly often, and you and I have exchanged posts.

There's a new boylover at BoyChat who's feeling pretty scared about the fact that he's attracted to boys. As I was reading his post, I was remembering the story you linked to at Crossroads last month, about a man and a fourteen-year-old boy who fell in love with each other. I didn't read the whole story, so I can't recall the plot, but I was wondering whether you remembered the link so that I could post it to the new boylover. I remember that the story was quite old, and I thought I could point him to it to show him that boylovers have been around for a long time, so he wouldn't be frightened of what he is.

I hope all is well for you and whatever young friends you have in your life right now.

Johnnie (White Rose)

* * *

The reply arrived almost immediately.

* * *

To: whiterose@anonymail.com
From: goldstar@freespirits.org
Date: February 28, 19:59 PST
Subject: The link you wanted

Dear Johnnie,

(Thanks for honoring me with your name, by the way.) The story you're thinking of is "The Priest and the Acolyte," which was written in 1894 by John Francis Bloxam. I'm not sure whether it's the best story for the purpose you mention, but feel free to give the new boylover the link. (I've pasted the link below.) It's certainly an interesting story from a historical point of view. It was written by one of the authors of the English "Uranian" movement, a loose association of authors and artists who celebrated their love of boys.

> I hope you don't mind my writing you out of the blue like this.

Jesus, no need to apologize; I was planning to write to you myself. I've really been liking your posts at Crossroads, especially the one you wrote about how boylovers and anti-BL people have more in common than they often think.

The other members of the Crossroads Committee have liked your posts too, and we were wondering whether you had the time and inclination to join our committee and become a moderator of Crossroads.

We lost a lot of moderators last year, partly as a result of too many flame wars and partly as a result of fights over whether the committee was too unbalanced. We always have a harder time getting non-peds to join us than we do getting boylovers and girl-lovers to join us. (We haven't had any peds from the sexual recovery community join us yet; we hope that will happen one of these days.)

At the moment, three of us are moderating Crossroads, and we have to struggle to keep the board monitored at all times. All of us try to help out on the weekends, but the weekday moderating is a "shift" affair. Conscientious Objector (who lives in Europe) covers the board from three a.m. to noon EST, while Pedo-Hag covers the afternoon hours. I'm online from six p.m. to eleven p.m. Pacific Time (that's ten p.m. to three a.m. for you East Coasters). Unfortunately, I can't cover the earlier evening hours because I have a class Mondays through Thursdays at that time.

I've noticed that you tend to be online in the early evening, till around the time that I show up. Would you like to join us? All that the job requires is the skin of an elephant to withstand all the cries of outrage when you edit or delete a post. Fortunately, our rules are quite simple and confined to security matters (such as not letting participants out each other).

I suppose I ought to add that you'll be expected to keep private whatever confidential information you run across as a moderator. I'm the only one on the committee who has access to IP addresses, the code that gives the approximate location of the poster's computer. (I only need to look up this information if big security problems arise.) But you'll be able to see other delicate information, such as previous versions of edited and deleted posts, so we'll have to ask you to remain quiet about what you see. If this is a condition you couldn't live with, just let us know.

I hope you'll join us. It's not just because of our overwork that we're asking you to join us, you know, but because of your effort to understand other points of view and to learn from them, which is the sort of spirit we're trying to foster at our board. We don't want non-stop flame wars.

Yours,
Gold Star

To: goldstar@freespirits.org
From: whiterose@anonymail.com
Date: February 28, 23:10 EST
Subject: Gods, yes!

Dear Gold Star,

Gods, I'm flattered. I mean, I've only been posting at the boylove boards for two months. Are you sure you haven't mistaken me for someone who is actually experienced at this sort of thing?

It's past my bedtime, so I'll write more in the morning. Let me just say that of course I understand your security concerns and will keep private anything I see as a committee member. I don't see that it would be an ethical problem, any more than you would have an ethical problem keeping my first name private.

It's awfully nice to hear from you tonight. I've been feeling lonely—

* * *

He stopped, backspaced, and tried again.

* * *

I've been feeling the need to talk to someone, because I had something nice happen to me tonight: I was able to help out a co-worker who was in distress, and I was also able to chat a bit with her son. It's really such a small incident that it doesn't seem as though it's worth posting about it at BoyChat, but maybe you don't mind my mentioning it here. Also, being able to help my co-worker meant as much to me as talking to the boy, and I don't think that's something everyone at BoyChat would understand, but I think you would. At least, I sense that from your posts.

I'll talk to you tomorrow (cyberspacedly speaking).

Yours truly,
Johnnie

* * *

The milk had cooled far too much by the time he poured it into a cup, but he added the cocoa anyway, sipping on the drink as he walked over to the window. The late evening crowd had begun to gather. Since it was a weeknight, the queue was confined mainly to older men and women, some of them looking as though they were long-married couples. Johnnie watched one couple – a grey-haired man and woman – buy tickets and disappear into the theater. Then he swallowed the remainder of the cocoa and returned to the kitchen table.

It took only a few minutes for him to wash his dishes and place them on the drying rack. The cardboard carton went into the trash, and he wiped the counter clean with a sponge. He checked that his briefcase was ready for the next day, and then he disappeared into the bathroom.

He emerged wearing pajamas striped like a blue candy cane. He was about to shut off the lights when he remembered the laptop. He walked over and switched it off. His eye, idly straying, caught sight of the magazine, which had fallen on the floor. He stooped to pick it up, and as he did so, his gaze ran mechanically over one of the paragraphs before him.

"Most pedophiles lead quite ordinary lives," says FBI agent Darren Franklin, who hunts down online predators who visit forums designed for conversation about molesting children. "If you met them, you'd be surprised by how normal they seem. Only when you've seen what they do to kids do you realize how dangerous these people are."

* * *

Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Posted at BoyChat by True Boylover on Thursday, March 1, at 8:42 AM

I can't thank you guys enough for all of the responses I received. Thanks to you I now know what I only suspected before, which is that I can keep myself from hurting any of the kids in my town. (By the way, Brick, I'll try to remember the security tips you e-mailed me. It's just hard to remember them when I'm posting, because I'm so excited to be here.)

I've never met such a wonderful group of people in my life. Thanks to you I'll always be a

True Boylover

Chapter Two

Firewall

A few diary entries
Posted at Crossroads by Conscientious Objector on Thursday, March 15, at 6:32 AM

August 9: Bill and I walked on the beach again today, hand in hand. It's the first time he's let me hold his hand since that day when we first met. Ever since then, whenever I've tried to hold his hand, he has jerked away and joked about me being too old for that sort of thing. When he finally let me touch him, I felt as though an electric spark went through me.

We stopped to sit on that rock in the cove, and I put my hand on his thigh, but before I could move it higher up, he got up and said that we had better head back. I must find a way to make him understand.

September 12: A big scene today: Mom decided to flip my mattress, and she found the magazine that Ricky had lent me, the one he found lying outside that bar where only men go. Everything after that was awful, with Mom crying and Dad shouting and nosey parker Janet popping into the room every few minutes and asking what I'd done wrong.

When Dad stopped shouting and started talking quietly, things got even worse: he was talking about how homosexuals can always be cured and how shock therapy techniques have improved, and I finally bolted from the house. I went to a pay phone and called Bill. Fortunately, he was home from work.

I ended up crying over the phone like a little kid; luckily, Bill didn't mind. He told me lots of funny stories about the fights he used to have with his parents, and I felt better afterwards. I realized that this is just how some parents are, and you have to put up with it. I know now, though, that I'll never be able to tell my parents about Bill. They just wouldn't understand.

September 15: Ricky told me today that he heard from one of the ninth-graders that, if you stand in the alleyway behind that bar, sometimes men will come out and talk with you, and sometimes they'll let you have sex with them. Sometimes they'll even give you money afterwards. Ricky says he hasn't tried it yet because he's afraid to go there alone.

I wanted to rush up to the alley right away, but then it occurred to me that if Bill heard about me doing that, he might misunderstand and think that I didn't love him any more. I want him to know that he's the most important one, so I think I'll wait a bit with the alley thing.

September 20: My parents went out all of this afternoon, so Ricky and I were finally able to do it. Ricky was very excited afterwards and said that the first time is always the best, but I felt kind of let down. Even though we used the pictures from the magazine as a guide (I sneaked the magazine out of Mom's dresser), it still didn't feel okay – I kept getting the feeling that we weren't doing it right. I wish that Bill had been there instead.

September 29: Last week Mom and Dad came home all happy from their day out, and today I found out why. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to have to go to a stinking therapist who will "cure" me.

I went out and phoned Bill, using this as an excuse to ask him to meet me at the beach cove. (The weather has turned cold, so I knew that no one else would be there.) He came right away, but when I showed him the magazine for queers and tried to hold him, he got up and walked away without even saying goodbye. I cried for three hours.

I'm going to try writing him a letter.

October 3: Yes! He said yes! Joy, joy, joy!

October 4: It was so wonderful. God, God, God. It was everything I dreamed it would be.

~~~

The above passages (with my atrocious spelling and punctuation cleaned up) are actual entries from the diary I kept when I was twelve. Now tell me again, dear CA, how I was "groomed" in order to be "molested."

I know which of us was the seducer, and it wasn't my lover.

Conscientious Objector, hoping to open your mind a crack

Translating your post
Posted at Crossroads by Concerned & Angry on Thursday, March 15, at 4:45 PM
In reply to A few diary entries posted by Conscientious Objector

First of all, I have no proof that any of this actually happened. It looks like exactly the sort of story that an offender like you would make up in order to justify his abuse.

But even if it were true, all that it proves is that the worst aspect of pedophilia is that the abuser manages to convince his victim that it was "his" idea and causes the victim to bond with the abuser. This is a well-documented phenomenon called the Stockholm Syndrome; you can find information about it in books on hostages and on prisoners of war.

Here's what actually happened to you, though your abuser didn't allow you to recognize this.

# # #

August 9: One of the first things that an abuser will do is introduce certain ideas about sexual activity into the mind of the child, but do it so subtly that the child will not realize that he never thought of doing these activities until the abuser suggested it to him. Thus, for example, you had the idea that holding hands was something that you wanted to do, not something that your abuser wanted you to do. But here in this entry you slip, and you admit that he first held hands with you, which of course planted the idea in your mind right away that you would please him if you held hands with him further. (Incidentally, in reference to your earlier post, a grooming time of eighteen months is not at all unusual. Pedophiles like to convince themselves that they "love" the children they abuse, so they come up with all sorts of activities of mock love before they take the child to bed.)

September 12: This entry is a classic. The easiest way for a pedophile to win a child's love is to separate him from his parents' love. In most cases, this is done in a very subtle fashion; the pedophile will begin by saying, "Your parents don't understand you," and only later will he say, "I'm the only one who understands you." This entry reveals that your abuser had begun his final stages of grooming you.

September 15: Oh, God, what can I say about this entry? That the children of your town were prostituting themselves, and that the men in your town were taking advantage of such innocence . . . It's just too awful to contemplate.

September 20: HOMOSEXUALITY IS NOT THE SAME THING AS PEDOPHILIA! PEER SEX PLAY IS NOT THE SAME THING AS CHILD ABUSE! You keep mixing them up in these entries – that's understandable since you were a child, but you should know better now.

Homosexuality is not a mental illness; pedophilia is. Here is the definition of pedophilia, as it appears in the fourth edition (text revision) of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association:

Over a period of at least six months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children (generally age 13 years or younger). The person has acted on these sexual urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies caused marked distress or interpersonal difficulty. The person is at least age 16 years and at least 5 years older than the child or children in Criterion A. Note: Do not include an individual in late adolescence involved in an ongoing sexual relationship with a 12- or 13-year-old.

The American Psychiatric Association goes on to describe the nature of pedophiles:

[Pedophiles'] activities are commonly explained with excuses or rationalizations that they have "educational value" for the child, that the child derives "sexual pleasure" from them, or that the child was "sexually provocative" – themes that are also common in pedophilic pornography. . . .

Individuals may limit their activities to their own children, stepchildren, or relatives or may victimize children from outside their families. Some individuals with Pedophilia threaten the child to prevent disclosure. Others, particularly those who frequently victimize children, develop complicated techniques for obtaining access to children, which may include winning the trust of a child's mother, marrying a woman with an attractive child, trading children with other individuals with Pedophilia, or, in rare instances, taking in foster children from nonindustrialized countries or abducting children from strangers.

Except in cases in which the disorder is associated with Sexual Sadism, the person may be attentive to the child's needs in order to gain the child's affection, interest and loyalty and to prevent the child from reporting the sexual activity.

So, you see, the desire to have sex with a child is linked with a desire to manipulate and rape. That's why all of you here need to get psychiatric help now!

Children having sex with children their own age is entirely different from an adult taking advantage of a child. I'm not surprised that you didn't recognize this at the time; abuse victims often don't. Women who are sexually exploited by therapists or clergy often believe at the time that they are just as free to say no as their exploiter is. Only afterwards do they realize the extent of the power difference between themselves and the person who exploited them.

You were a child; you did not truly have the ability to say no to your abuser, even if you thought that you did. Children are biologically made to try to please adults – that's part of being a child. Your abuser took advantage of this to make you want to please him, even to the extent of convincing you that you were doing the seducing.

September 29: Here is the type of case that turns up so often in child abuse literature, of a child changing his memories of what happened as a way to deny the full extent of his abuse. You say that you showed your abuser a "queer magazine." Actually, what must have happened is that he showed you a magazine, most likely one that was filled with child pornography that would give you a good idea of what sort of acts he wanted you to perform. In this way, he not only exploited you, but he exploited all the victims in the pictures he showed you (in the same way that a man who willingly accepts stolen goods is as much a thief as the man who steals the goods). Naturally, by the end of this session, he had thoroughly convinced you that the rape of children was love.

I'm not sure how to interpret the end of this entry. Perhaps your abuser was having brief feelings of guilt, as offenders sometimes do in the moments before they offend. Or perhaps he just didn't like the idea of having anal sex with you on a windy beach.

October 3-4: Tragedy, tragedy, tragedy.

# # #

If these diaries entries are real, then I feel truly sorry for you, because you not only were abused but are now continuing this terrible chain by abusing other boys. I would encourage you to seek out a good therapist, and perhaps look into whether you should try to recover your memories of the missing events at the time of your abuse. You can find the help you need by looking up "child abuse" in the yellow pages, or your church may be able to refer you to an appropriate bureau.

CA stands for Concerned & Angry

Conscientious Objector and Concerned & Angry: Final Warning
Posted at Crossroads by Gold Star on Thursday, March 15, at 10:45 PM
In reply to Translating your post posted by Concerned & Angry

I must remind both of you once more of Crossroads' security policy against the discussion of illegal activity that has not been dealt with judicially; this includes both activity by oneself and activity by others. This is not the proper place to make a confession or accusation of illegal activity. If you feel a compulsion to do so, please consult a priest or a policeman, as the case may warrant.

Conscientious Objector: I'm permitting your post to stand because it describes events from forty years ago. Too many of your recent posts, though, have skated near the edge. You're a moderator, C.O.; you should know better.

Concerned & Angry: Please try to remember that we don't permit participants to accuse other participants of illegal activity. I'm sure that you wouldn't like it if another participant here accused you, without judicial proof of your guilt, of engaging in illegal activity in order to locate boylovers. If your remarks to Conscientious Objector, White Rose, and others here about them abusing boys are meant to be a statement that you believe they have engaged in abusive behavior by having legal sex with minors who are above the age of consent, then please make this clear in your posts.

Both of you: Pedo-Hag, White Rose, and I are getting tired of having to continually edit and delete your posts, as well as having to post first warnings to you every few days. The next time that one of you breaks a security rule, the offending party will receive a ban from Crossroads, temporarily or permanently, as the case may warrant. The Crossroads Committee is too overburdened with work to have time to deal with irreformable repeat offenders.

Gold Star
Webmaster
Crossroads

My apologies
Posted at Crossroads by Conscientious Objector on Friday, March 16, at 3:12 AM
In reply to Conscientious Objector and Concerned & Angry: Final Warning posted by Gold Star

My posts about sex with boys are purely hypothetical. I love to love boys hypothetically. As an example of the reformed behavior that I penitently intend to engage in from this point forward, please follow the link below to my post at BoyChat describing, in a hypothetical fashion, what it is like to share a shower with an eleven-year-old.

Conscientious Objector, turning over a new leaf

Link: Why anal is better than oral

To: whiterose@anonymail.com
From: paul@chaplaincy.oldcityuniv.edu
Date: March 16, 18:13 EST
Subject: Re: Re: This is Paul from CBF, introducing myself

Dear White Rose,

On March 15, you wrote:

> About a support group for your friend: I'm afraid I only know of one publicly advertised support group for boylovers that meets in real life, and it's not close to where your minor-attracted friend lives. I know that some boylovers who live in metropolitan areas meet informally with each other, but of course those meetings aren't advertised. Why don't you suggest to your friend that he visit CBF?

Jevon's college monitors its students' Internet use, so that's not possible, but thanks for the suggestion. It's proving much harder than I'd expected to find a support group for a non-offending minor-attracted adult. Jevon didn't care for the ex-gay meeting I took him to – his family is only nominally Christian – and the sex addiction group he has been attending this spring really isn't proving to be of much help to him. When I met him last year, he already had much better control over his sexual impulses than most non-pedophiles I know.

> If he has told his parents, as you say, then perhaps he could consider starting a "support circle," as a number of CBF participants have done. The idea is that you tell everyone close to you in real life who you believe you can trust with the secret: parents, brothers and sisters, friends, pastors, etc. That way, when you need guidance in your life, you have the same sort of network of real-life assistance that most non-boylovers do. The people who know you in real life may be able to figure out things that your online friends can't, since your online friends can't judge the situation close up.

That's a terrific suggestion, and I'll be sure to pass it on to Jevon.

> No, I'm not Neo-Pagan or Hindu. I started saying "Oh, gods" in high school because my parents didn't like me taking the Lord's name in vain. Apparently, it's all right to take the name of other people's gods in vain. :)

I met a Neo-Pagan boylover at CBF the other day who was seriously offended because I don't light candles to honor Zeus and his loved boy Ganymede. He asked me sternly whether I was opposed to interfaith tolerance.

> I haven't really found a label for what I believe. I guess you could say that I believe in Something that provides guidance to us and whose commands we should obey, but I think that everyone finds a different name for this Something. An atheist boylover I know (Gold Star) says that he follows the dictates of Conscience (he doesn't capitalize it, but he talks about it as though it were capitalized).

I hope, then, that his conscience is well-informed. An ill-informed conscience is a menace.

> As for myself, Socrates worshipped the god Love, and Jesus told his followers to worship the God who is Love, so I guess I've always envisioned the Something that is guiding me as Love – true love, naturally, not the selfish kind.

Ah, but which true love? English is a deficient language in that respect. If we had been writing in Greek, you'd have known that the Love Socrates worshipped was Eros, while the Love that Jesus enjoined us to worship is Agape (three syllables; I can't add accent marks to e-mail).

In Greek there are three main words for love; interestingly, two of them are used to describe ancient forms of boylove. (Thank you, by the way, for explaining how boylove is the English translation of pedophilia and pederasty. Despite my Greek classes in college, I never would have made that connection if you hadn't explained it.)

Eros is sexual love, as in paiderastia/pederasty, the sexual love of boys. Philia is friendship love, as in paidophilia/pedophilia, the affectionate love of boys (obviously the word got extended beyond its original nonsexual meaning). And agape is disinterested love. It the sort of love that God has for us and that we are supposed to have for everyone else, including our enemies – the sort of love that gives without demanding any reward for the giving. There's no such word in Greek as paidagape, but I gather that some of the CBF participants such as yourself are trying to achieve that sort of disinterested love toward boys.

Eros and philia play their proper role in life – certainly a friendship between a man and a boy is nothing to be sneered at – but the highest form of love, I believe, is agape, because it gives without asking any return: it is purely selfless. The best description of it that I know of is in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (who were an early congregation that apparently needed some lecturing on this topic):

"Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends . . ."

> I'll ask At Peace to send you a document CBF produced several years ago on how boylovers can start real-life peer support groups and support circles.

Speaking of which, below you'll find my work address and my cell phone number. As you can see, I work for a city university; I'm an administrative assistant to the chaplain here. If things ever get stressful for you and you need someone to talk with in real life, I hope you'll consider giving me a call. (That is, if you live in the U.S. or Canada. I know that an overseas call might be prohibitive.) Think of me as an extension of the support circle that I trust you already have to help you in real life.

Sincerely,
Paul Kovar

* * *

Johnnie paused at the entrance to the campus café. Most of the students apparently considered Saturday morning a time for recovering from the after-effects of Friday-night parties, for the large room was bare except for several servers behind the cafeteria-style counter, a couple of earnest-looking young men arguing over a model of a dodecahedron, a gaggle of giggling young women, and, sitting at the next table and apparently oblivious to the beauty nearby, a neatly dressed man idly fingering a coffee cup as he perused a folded newspaper.

The man was balding, with the sort of round spectacles one would expect to see worn by Bob Cratchit or some other overworked scribe from Victorian times. He was wearing a white shirt and a black jacket and a red bow tie. Something about that tie suddenly gave Johnnie an image of a much younger man, sporting a pink shirt and a lavender jacket, and moving his body with a swish. Then the man before him turned the paper with a gesture of stiff formality, and the illusion was shattered. All that sat at the table was an ordinary man in his forties, taking a leisurely morning break.

Feeling the same sort of churning in his stomach that a soldier might feel before a battle in which casualties were expected to be high, Johnnie walked over to the table. For a moment, the man remained absorbed in his paper; then he lifted his eyes and smiled. "White Rose?" he said.

Johnnie nodded, swallowing. "You can call me Johnnie."

"I'm glad to meet you finally," said Paul and reached out his hand. He had a firm handshake, with no indecision behind it.

"May I get you some coffee? Tea?" asked Paul, gesturing toward his cup.

Johnnie shook his head. His gaze was drifting over to the next table, where, if he read the whispers right, the girls were speculating – with interest and hope – whether he was a new faculty member. One girl gave him an unabashedly assessing look under her carefully darkened lashes.

Paul, following his gaze, said, "Would you like to walk over to my office? It's more private there."

Johnnie quelled a momentary vision of walking into a room where a gathering of police awaited him. "Sure. Whatever you'd like."

Paul gathered up his newspaper, smiled at the giggling girls, and took his cup over to the dishes rack before ushering Johnnie out into the March sunlight. The campus – dating from a time before the city had crept around the university like ivy – was wide and green, with colonial-style brick buildings and well-manicured lawns. Paul, watching a group of students who were using a book as a Frisbee, shook his head and said affectionately, "Students! Sometimes I wonder whether they do any studying at all. Not that the university goes to any great efforts to encourage the academic life. The university admissions pamphlet is almost entirely concerned with the virtues of our social programs."

Johnnie thought of the young men arguing over the dodecahedron. "The math department is good."

"Oh?" replied Paul, peering with intent curiosity over his wire-rimmed glasses.

Johnnie felt a vision descend upon him of Paul poring through the university records for a man named John, who appeared to be in his thirties, and who had once majored in math. Would the university have kept his identification photo? Resisting an impulse to flee screaming, Johnnie added hastily, "That's what a guy at work said who attended here. The weather has turned nice, hasn't it?"

"Yes, spring has arrived early," said Paul, apparently not averse to turning the conversation, and they strolled along the treeless campus, discussing the best time of the year to trim forsythia.

They were headed, Johnnie realized eventually, toward a building built in the style of New England churches, with a shining white steeple and double doors opened wide to admit visitors. It looked formidably conventional. Much to Johnnie's relief, Paul steered him over to a side door which, when opened, revealed nothing more burdensome than a hallway. As the door swung shut behind them, Paul said, "By the way, I can't remember whether you ever mentioned anything on this topic at CBF – are you by any chance attracted to adult males?"

Johnnie found himself looking automatically around the hallway, but nothing appeared to be stirring in this part of the building. "No, not at all," he replied.

"Forgive me for being so nosy, but I placed a discipline upon myself a number of years ago not to visit unchaperoned with men who might be attracted to me. Here we are." He pointed to a doorway.

Looking over at him, Johnnie thought of the giggling girls and their assessing looks, and he wondered suddenly what Paul's feelings had been when he saw Johnnie's appearance for the first time. He had no further opportunity to think about this, though, for Paul was leading him into an office not unlike the one where Johnnie worked. Gesturing Johnnie into a chair, Paul took the seat behind the desk, upon which was laid the ordinary implements of office life: a writing pad, a computer keyboard and monitor, a jar holding several pens – all blue or black, Johnnie noticed – a paper tray, and a ruler. There was nothing here to suggest that Paul was in any way out of the ordinary; again, it looked very much like Johnnie's own work desk.

Johnnie sank down into the seat offered, opened his briefcase, and withdrew some of the papers within. He placed them on Paul's desk, saying, "I printed out this message I posted at BoyChat; I wasn't sure whether you'd seen it. It says a little more about how I came to post at the BL boards."

Paul obediently pulled the papers forward, fished inside his jacket for a second pair of glasses, put them on, and read slowly through the post as Johnnie looked further around the room. There were no windows in the room; instead, the walls had been festooned with framed posters of Christian art, mainly Madonnas weeping over dead Christs. On top of a file cabinet nearby stood two framed pictures. One showed a large, smiling family, in which the only teenager not smiling was clearly Paul. The other picture showed a grown-up Paul beaming as he curled his arm around a woman his own age, who was wearing a necklace holding a cross.

Paul removed his reading glasses and returned them to his jacket pocket, saying, "This story that you link to at the end of the post, 'The Priest and the Acolyte' – do you have a copy of it?"

"Not on me," said Johnnie. "I could e-mail you the link."

"I'd appreciate that," said Paul, leaning back in his chair as he adjusted his regular glasses on his nose. "Can you tell me what it's about?"

"I haven't read it all the way through," said Johnnie. "The part I read seemed very romantic, if a little sentimental. It's about this man who falls in love with a—"

He stopped, alerted not only by the footstep in the hallway, but by the change in Paul's expression. Paul's eyes flicked over to the doorway behind Johnnie, and he said, "Hello, Matt. I didn't expect to see you here today. Don't you have that talk at the Muslim Student Council this morning?"

Johnnie looked over his shoulder and saw a man with a clerical collar standing at the doorway. The minister looked with curiosity at Johnnie, but he said only, "I'm supposed to be there right now. I only stopped by to pick up that interfaith document on conflict resolution and restorative justice."

Paul dug through the pile of papers in his paper tray and emerged with a series of limp fax sheets paper-clipped together. "Here you are," he said, standing up to hand the papers to the minister.

The minister checked the top page of the document, glanced with curiosity at Johnnie again, and said, "Thanks, that helps. I'll see you on Monday."

"Good luck with the talk," said Paul and escorted the minister courteously to the door. Once the clergyman was gone, he shut the door.

Johnnie waited until he could no longer hear the receding footsteps in the hallway before he said, "Do they know here that you're gay?" He caught the flicker in Paul's expression and said hastily, "Sorry, I meant ex-gay."

Paul paused next to a knee-high refrigerator and leaned over to open it. "If I were gay, my life would be a lot easier. This university has a diversity-and-tolerance policy; one of the biggest departments in the administration is its Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Affairs Office. When I mentioned in my interview that I had done record-keeping for an ex-gay ministry, you'd have thought from the expressions of my interviewers that I'd just admitted to being a minion of Lucifer, come to drag the students into hell. Lemonade?"

Johnnie accepted the glass bottle from his hand as Paul reseated himself, saying, "They wanted me to promise that I would never talk about ex-gay matters to the students. All I could promise was that, if any student asked me for information on local Christian ministries dealing with same-gender attraction, I would provide them with brochures from both the ex-gay ministries and the pro-gay ministries, leaving the student to decide which path was best for him. My interviewers weren't happy about that, but fortunately Matt is very much concerned with dialogue between conflicting parties, and I was able to make him see that the university wouldn't be showing much commitment to diversity and tolerance if it refused to hire me solely because I'm opposed to homosexual behavior." He opened his own bottle of pink lemonade and sipped at it with clear pleasure, like a boy on a hot summer's day.

"I guess it's especially hard being both conservative and attracted to males," said Johnnie. "At Peace said once that his life would be much easier if he were in favor of BL sex, because as it is, he's attacked on both sides: by many of the BLs, because he's morally opposed to BL sex, and by the conservative non-pedophiles who come onto CBF, because he has the bad taste not to share their sexual feelings."

"Yes, those of you BLs who have committed yourself to lifelong celibacy have a hard road to travel. I can say that from experience."

Part of Johnnie noted with appreciation that Paul had followed his lead in adopting the abbreviation BL – less likely to be understood by outsiders if overheard – but the other part of him was occupied with noting the sudden increase in his heartbeat. After a moment, he placed his lemonade on the desk and said, "I'm not sure . . . That is, I don't know whether I've made such a commitment yet."

This was it, said Johnnie to himself as he looked at Paul's unrevealing face. This was the moment when a button was pushed or a finger was lifted, and policemen burst through the doors. He felt sweat forming on his palms, and he tried to rub them dry unobtrusively on the leather of his briefcase.

But all that Paul did was lean forward and say, "Can you tell me why?"

Johnnie licked his lips, then fished into the briefcase again. He handed the papers to Paul silently.

Paul took a mercilessly long time reading through Conscientious Objector's recent posts to Concerned & Angry. When he was finally finished, he stared into space for several moments before removing his reading glasses and saying, "I have a friend who eats every night at restaurants that serve junk food. I've invited him several times to join me at a better-class steak house that serves hamburgers and the like, but he always says, 'Why should I eat elsewhere? The food here is great.'"

After a moment, Johnnie said, "Maybe it's a matter of taste. My mom loves Hershey's chocolates, so one time I bought her Godiva chocolates for her birthday, but she didn't like them. I heard her tell my dad that they tasted too rich."

"Yes, but was she deprived of the opportunity to eat Godiva chocolates in the years when her tastes were forming?" Paul let Conscientious Objector's posts fall onto the table and leaned forward. "This gentleman worships at the altar of Eros – that's transparent in every line he writes. It's clear that he cannot conceive of a lifelong friendship that is based on anything other than an exchange of sexual pleasure. He may practice agapé unknowing, but I doubt that he understands what it is or makes any attempt to pursue disinterested love when given the choice between that and eros. This is hardly surprising; eros is the love he was given when he was young, at an age when our views are formed on what is most praiseworthy in life. But do you think that if his friend had had the strength and the courage to keep saying no to his sexual demands, and was able to find a way to show him higher forms of love, that Conscientious Objector would now be flitting from bed to bed as his posts imply?"

"You can't be sure that's the reason," Johnnie said, fingering the empty lemonade bottle before him.

"No, I can't be absolutely sure. That's the problem with BL sex; it's like Russian roulette. You never know how matters will turn out." He drummed his fingers on the table a moment before saying, "I'm still in the learning stages at CBF, Johnnie, but I was under the impression that the reason you folks call yourselves boylovers is because you love boys. Do you really want to risk fixating a boy on eros for life? Are you sure that you want to risk ruining his life in that way?"

For a minute, Johnnie stared at the corrugated glass and the small amount of pink liquid at the bottom of the bottle. Then he raised his eyes and said levelly, "Are you sure that you want to marry your girlfriend and risk ruining her life? How can you be sure that having sex with her won't cause her to fixate on eros?"

To his surprise, Paul laughed. "Touché," said the older man. "I can see why you spend so much time in debates at Crossroads. There's a difference between your situation and mine, but I trust that you'll come to see that over time. Would you like a tour of the chapel? Matt thankfully cleared out all the horrible 'improvements' of the seventies when he took over here – abstract paintings, posters of Snoopy saying 'Happiness is a Loved Child,' pictures of Jesus dressed as a Vietnam war protestor, etc."

Johnnie, who remembered quite well the bad art from the baccalaureate ceremony he had attended for his parents' sake, rose from his seat and followed Paul toward the door, then looked back at the desk. His post and Conscientious Objector's posts were still sitting there in plain sight. "Aren't you going to put those away?" Johnnie asked.

"The posts? Yes, I suppose I should." Paul went back to his desk, tossed the posts negligently onto the top of the paper tray, and then walked over to the doorway where Johnnie still stood. Johnnie was left with an uneasy feeling as he followed Paul, who was now speaking of the benefits of stark simplicity in religious architecture.

* * *

"I think it depends on the boylover," said Johnnie. "What your AOA is – your age of attraction – makes a big difference too. Gold Star, the Webmaster of Crossroads, posted once that he figured out when he was nine, because he fell in love that year with a first-grader. He didn't have the word to describe what he was, but he knew that he was different from the other boys."

Paul was leaning forward over the desk, his elbows on the writing pad and his chin resting upon his hands. He nodded. Johnnie had lost track of how long they had been talking; the lights in the windowless room gave the place an air of perpetual day, as though its inhabitants could speak for centuries without pausing.

"I can't claim to have been that precocious," said Paul. "I began to guess about myself when I was in senior high – and highly terrifying it was too. It took me quite a number of years to nerve myself up to the point of telling my family and the other members of my church. I received one measure of God's mercy: I knew from the start that I should never act on my feelings. The Bible, church tradition, reason – everything combined to tell me this. My big mistake came in thinking that the proper place for me was within the gay community. I didn't know of any other support network, and I desperately needed to be with others like myself."

He settled back in his chair, a shadow passing across his expression. "Those were terrible years for me; it's only been in the last few years that I've been able to bear being around gay people again. For a long time, the wounds were too deep. Daily temptations to sin, and each time people would be standing at my elbow saying, 'What's wrong? You love him, don't you? Why not show him your love?' I used to come home from gay gatherings and be sick in the bathroom, because I was so conflicted between what I believed was right and what others around me believed I should believe was right. Yet I couldn't stand to cut myself off from the fellowship of other same-gender-attracted people."

"How did you leave the gay community?" Johnnie asked. He was leaning back in his chair now, restful, with the briefcase put aside and his hearing no longer alert for policemen's footsteps in the hallway.

"God sent me a messenger: an ex-ex-gay. She was a lesbian who had had a very bad experience in the ex-gay ministries and therefore was bitterly opposed to them; she told me about them in order to warn me against them. I could have kissed her feet in gratitude. It was harder than I had thought it would be to break myself off from the social network of the gay world, but from the moment I learned about the ex-gay ministries, I thought, 'Thank God! After all these wasted years, I'm finally coming home.'"

Above the low hum of the building's air circulation, Johnnie said, "I guess in a way I envy you. I didn't know any other boylovers until three months ago, and it took me longer than you to figure out what I was. When I was in middle school, I first realized that I was attracted to boys, and that in itself was hard enough – coming to terms with the idea of being gay. Then, just when I was starting to get a handle on that, I moved up to high school, and I began to feel that something else was wrong. I mean, juniors in high school usually aren't attracted to twelve-year-olds. But I was attracted to enough of the boys in my high school that I could still convince myself that I was a normal gay."

He could feel his body growing more tense, and he willed himself to relax, focussing his thoughts on Paul's studious eyes. "I took a year off after high school in order to earn money for college, and when I finally started my freshman year, my world just exploded. Some of the guys who had been a year below me in high school were in my freshman class – guys I had been attracted to one year before. Only I wasn't attracted to them any more; I wasn't attracted to any of my college classmates. But if I passed a twelve-year-old on the street, my heart would pound. That's when I figured out that I wasn't attracted to adults. I was only attracted to boys in middle school and high school."

Johnnie shook his head as he tilted his chair back. "I'd told my classmates when I arrived at college that I was gay; this was supposed to be my big coming out. Now I didn't know what to do. I didn't dare tell anyone the truth – I was certain that I'd be kicked out of college if I did so. I had one very long night at the beginning of my senior year when I simply lay in bed sobbing, from bedtime until close to dawn. I couldn't figure out whether I should turn myself in to the police or slit my wrists or go out and rape a child. I thought those were my only options. I was just getting up the courage to search the dorm bathroom for razor blades when I heard Something inside me say, 'No, you don't want to do any of those things. You want to help boys.'

"What I heard made no sense, and I guess that's why I believed it. It wasn't a thought that would have ever occurred to me; it went against everything I knew about pedophiles. So the next day I signed up for the college's volunteer tutoring program to high school students, and from that point on, my path has been clear. Until this year, I was still half convinced that I would lose control and molest a boy, but at least I knew from senior year onwards that raping boys wasn't what I wanted."

He looked over at Paul, who was sitting with his hands folded, in a straight-postured pose. There was something comforting about this room, with its neat appearance and its signs of conventionality. Johnnie felt as though he were a juvenile delinquent who had spent several years in the detention room and was now, unexpectedly, being invited into the principal's office for a friendly chat.

He added, "I guess what's kept me from going crazy all these years is that Something, which told me what the rest of the world wouldn't tell me. In the back of my mind, I've always had the feeling that, if I ever faced a crisis again, the Something would come and tell me what to do. Fortunately, I haven't had that crisis yet."

Paul moved finally, reaching forward to unscrew a fountain pen, inspect its contents, and then screw the cap back on and place it in the pen holder. He said, "I am ashamed."

"Ashamed?" Startled, Johnnie returned the front legs of his chair to the floor.

Paul shook his head. "There is one problem you encounter over and over and over when you're same-gender-attracted; it has always mystified me. I could never understand how so many good Christians could fall into Pharisaism. Now I know."

He raised his eyes to look at Johnnie, saying quietly, "I've been like the Pharisee in the temple, saying, 'God, I thank thee that I am not like these sinners.' I wrote at CBF that I was a sinner and that I wanted you people to pray for me and that I hoped to learn from you – but those were just empty words. My mind told me that all of us are fellow sinners, but my heart had me convinced that I was better than the rest of you. I came to CBF as a missionary, to explain to you poor, deluded, misguided pedophiles what path you should take in life. I, your moral superior, was there to guide you, since obviously I knew more than you did. And here I find myself cast down to the bottom of the table, while you move to the front of the table and instruct me on where I have gone wrong."

Johnnie felt acutely uncomfortable. For the first time in several hours, he picked up his briefcase and fingered it. "I said something that was helpful to you?"

Paul nodded. "You revealed to me that we draw nearer to God, not in the times when we are free of temptation, but in the moments when we are filled with temptation and manage to resist it. I had known that with my mind, but it took your words to show my heart that this was true. All those years when I was under daily temptation, those 'wasted' years that I thought would have been better spent in the ex-gay ministries . . . Now I see that those were years when I was drawing closer to the Lord."

Paul smiled, his hand reaching up unconsciously to adjust his red bow tie. "White Rose, I think you have just healed the last of my wounds from those years. Thank you."

Johnnie couldn't think of what to say. The administrative wing of the chapel was very quiet, too far from the outside to have any sound but for the ticking of the clock on the wall. Paul glanced at the clock and said, "It's getting late. I'd invite you home for dinner, but I'm afraid that I have a date this evening. May I give you a ride back to your place?"

There was a pause of three heartbeats, and then Johnnie – responding more to long self-training than to reasoned decision – said, "No, I wouldn't want to put you out of your way. Thanks for the offer, though."

Paul nodded, apparently undisturbed by this rebuff. He stood up and began to escort Johnnie out of the room and into the dark hallway beyond, lit only by exit signs.

"I can't promise never to lecture you again on how to live your life," Paul said as they reached the outer door. "I'm afraid that's a habit I haven't been able to break myself of. But if you should notice me going astray on my own path, would you be kind enough to give me a nudge in the right direction? We poor, deluded, misguided 'normal people' need help from others."

Johnnie laughed then, and he was still laughing when the door closed behind him, and he found himself standing in the cool dark of the evening.

* * *

You guys are the greatest!
Posted at BoyChat by True Boylover on Saturday, March 17, at 9:05 PM

All the posts and e-mails you guys have been sending me have really helped! My life is so much better than it was a month ago.

White Rose, thanks for pointing out to me At Peace's post at the Christian Boylove Forum about warning signs of sex addiction. I went through the checklist, and I can see I'm going to have to start cleaning up my life. (I won't say how here, because it might break the rules.)

Conscientious Objector, your advice about daily meditation is GREAT. My apartment building is a bit too noisy for that sort of thing, but I've found a cabin in the woods nearby that no one seems to use, and it's the perfect spot for clearing my mind in the way you suggested.

I like what you said about the Hindus using sacred sexuality as a way to reach the Inner Self, but I'm having problems, because every time I try to focus on the image you suggested – a man and a boy kissing each other – I end up having one of my rape fantasies again. I don't think it's supposed to work that way, so maybe you could tell me what I'm doing wrong.

My life used to be really dull, with me spending endless evenings looking at stuff I shouldn't look at, but now I spend my evenings reading posts at BoyChat, and every day I feel a lot better. So thanks again!

Love,
True Boylover

Chapter Three

Log In

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 husband 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

Chapter Four

Password Protected

A few points
Posted at the Christian Boylove Forum by Gold Star on Saturday, April 7, at 1:31 AM
In reply to Trying to understand you folks better by Paul

<<What I find hardest to understand is why, if you care about boys, you allow other boylovers who are hurting boys to continue in their actions. Right now at Crossroads, one of the moderators is boasting about his sexual conquests, while over at BoyChat there is a young boylover who is obviously seriously ill, yet no one is doing anything to help him before he explodes and murders a child. Now, I understand that you're not in the best position to go to the police – and truth to tell, I prefer community-based solutions to preventing crime rather than dragging these matters through the courts. But surely it wouldn't be too much trouble for a few of you to visit these men and stop them from hurting the boys you care about.>>

I don't usually post here, but I promised to do so on behalf of Conscientious Objector. I've just spent a half hour calming him down after he read your post. He was all set to come over here and post his views on judgmentalism, on negative attitudes toward sex, and his very long treatise on the evils that Christianity has perpetrated upon the world, none of which would be in keeping with the peaceful atmosphere that I gather CBF tries to cultivate. Myself, I prefer the rough-and-tumble free expression that Crossroads embodies, but I respect the work that At Peace is doing here, and I'd like to do what I can to help.

Conscientious Objector is particularly offended by the manner in which you chose to phrase your complaint against him. Paul, I'd like you to imagine for a moment that you married the girlfriend you've talked about, that you posted a message after your honeymoon, describing how happy you and your wife were together. Imagine that one of us stated that your post consisted of you "boasting about your sexual conquests." If you can imagine this scene, then I think you'll be able to understand Conscientious Objector's perspective on what you said.

That is the essence of Conscientious Objector's grievance. There are a few other points I'd like to make.

First point:

It's not clear to me what duties you think that we are neglecting. It is true that some of us here disagree with Conscientious Objector's views, and we have done our best over time to persuade him to change his views, just as he has tried to persuade us to leave our misguided ways. Short of turning him over to the police, what do you expect us to do? Yes, I get very concerned sometimes about what's happening with the boys Conscientious Objector meets, but I don't think I can do any more than I already have. I'll say more about that below.

As for True Boylover (I assume that's the BoyChat participant you're referring to), he's a different story altogether. It's clear that he needs special help beyond that which BoyChat is able to provide for most of its participants. Several boylovers have been going to a lot of trouble to try to locate such help for him. Again, I'm not sure where the origin is of your complaint.

Second point:

You suggest (if I may strip your words to their heart) that, if we believe our friends have committed a crime, we should out them to the authorities. I think that perhaps, with your background, you will be better able to understand my next question than most people: Do you really think that those of us who are celibate are in the proper moral position to cast judgment on those of us who are sexually active?

You've said that, at one time in your life, you considered engaging in gay sex. Do you really feel that you have a moral duty to call the police and tell them that a friend of yours, who made a different decision than you did about whether to make love to a man, is breaking a sodomy law?

And where do you draw the line? If it's all right to out someone who has broken civil law, should you also out someone who has broken church law? Or should you only out people who, in your personal judgment, are hurting their sexual partners? We had a boylover at BoyChat a few years back who developed moral qualms and began forwarding to the FBI every e-mail he received from boylovers who were attracted to boys eight years old or younger. Why eight? Because his own AOA was nine years and up, and in his personal judgment, having sex with kids in that age range was not harmful.

(This is something I have a hard time explaining to non-peds who depend on their gut reaction to determine which sexual acts are morally reprehensible. If I were to compose sexual laws based on what is personally distasteful to me, heterosexuality would be outlawed tomorrow.)

Third point:

You talk blithely about helping boys by calling in the police, and you imply that the only reason we haven't done so is to save our own skin. Forgive me, but it's clear to me that you've never actually witnessed what takes place when the police get involved.

Suppose that you had a friend who was taking illegal drugs and was also persuading his more innocent girlfriend to take drugs. Having failed to persuade him to stop, you concluded that the only way to protect your friend and the girl was to call the cops. Here's what would follow.

Your friend would be arrested and charged, not only with simple drug possession, but also with drug dealing, because his girlfriend had paid him for the drugs that he bought on her behalf. (You'd be amazed at how many charges can be placed against an arrested boylover; I can name a dozen offenses off the top of my head.) Then the police would have to decide whether to arrest the girl as well. (Keep in mind that an age of consent law means that it's illegal for a boy to have sex before a certain age. He has broken the law too.) Even if the girl isn't arrested, she will be grilled at length by police officers who are eager to gather as much evidence as possible against your friend. If the girl loves your friend, this means that they will try to break her of her loyalty by every means possible. Unless you've seen what happens when the police get their hands on a reluctant witness, you won't believe it.

So your friend is sent off to jail, to spend several years among hardened criminals. (At least he won't confront the cheery prospect faced by many boylovers these days, of being castrated.) He is then placed – if he goes to a good prison – in a drug rehabilitation program designed to convince him that he's the scum of the earth for ever contemplating taking drugs. If he continues to believe that drug use is not immoral . . . Well, I'll skip the painful details.

The end result of it all is that your friend emerges from the prison with his life in ruins. Do you have any idea how hard it is for a convicted criminal to get a job? Meanwhile, the girl you sought to protect will be utterly miserable at what her evidence did to the man she loved. It's not unknown, in such cases, for the convicted man and the victim to get back together again, simply because they've become convinced that the rest of the world is their persecutor. (I'm sure you've heard of cases of child abuse victims seeking out their abusers.)

So tell me: What part of this is supposed to help your friend and his girlfriend?

Fourth point:

You talk equally blithely of "community-based solutions." I'd very much like to know about those community-based solutions; I sure as hell haven't heard of them.

Since this is a Christian board, let me give you an example of why the community is hardly ever involved in these matters. I don't know which part of the world you went to college in, but let's pretend that it was in California, where the age of consent is eighteen. Suppose that, in a moment of weakness, you had taken to bed one night that seventeen-year-old classmate with whom you fell in love. Suppose that you had gone the next day to the college chaplain and told him what you had done. Suppose that you had asked his help in seeking therapy and in making as much reparation as you could to the young man and his family for what you had done.

Do you know where you would have been the next day? Behind bars, because California has a mandatory reporting law that does not exempt clergy.

So much for community-based solutions.

Fifth point:

You suggest that we should go visit Conscientious Objector and True Boylover in real life. Paul, even assuming that I have the airfare with which to do so, has it occurred to you that I might not know who these two gentlemen really are and where they live? Boylovers are not noted for their eagerness to reveal private information about themselves, and it ought not to take you much imagination to figure out why.

Sixth point:

Well, then, you will say, why don't I just tell everyone who I am and where I live, and then wait for other boylovers to come visit me? You speak in another post about the liberation you experienced by telling others of your sexual feelings, and how you would encourage everyone to here to undergo "spiritual growth" by revealing the secret of their ordeals to the world.

Paul, I don't know how to put this politely, so I'll be blunt: Being gay (or ex-gay if you prefer) is not the same thing as being a boylover. Yes, we are both members of sexual minorities that have been demonized. Every day, tragically, gays are attacked or murdered; every day gay youth kill themselves. Thankfully, a goodly number of people – including some conservatives such as yourself – are beginning to speak out against hatred and violence directed toward gays.

Who is speaking out against hatred and violence directed toward boylovers? I don't see any universities forming commissions to explore ways to prevent depression and suicide among teenage boylovers. I don't see any national leaders demanding that society find a way to combat the rising wave of hate crimes against boylovers. I don't see any churches passing resolutions saying that, although they believe adult-child sex to be a sin, it is just as grave a sin to hate someone merely because he is attracted to children.

Actually, I think that comparisons are odious; I hate the More Miserable Victim Than Thou game. It doesn't matter whether you gay people or we boylovers suffer more. Rather than make such calculations, I'd rather that we work together to free the world from all sorts of bigotry, large and small.

What worries me is that you will convince some inexperienced boylover on this board that, if he comes out, the worst he has to face is what you faced: having some of the people at his church refuse to sit next to him. I only wish that were the case.

I know a guy who got beaten bloody after he told his cousin that he was a boylover. When he had returned from the emergency room, the boylover naively called the police to report the crime. The police responded by ransacking his house and questioning the neighbors for clues that he had abused children. Once the police had departed (they found no evidence that he had committed a crime, for the simple reason that he hadn't), the boylover called his state's human rights department for information on what his rights were if he were beaten again (which seemed a likely scenario, as everyone in his neighborhood now knew that he was a boylover). The moment he said the word "pedophile," the human rights department informed him that his conversation was being recorded and that his words would be reported to the police. So he hung up, packed up his belongings, and moved from his neighborhood. He lives in another part of the country now, under a different name.

Or take Brick, who adhered to your advice to "share your secret with others."

Brick is one of the few boylovers on these boards whose real name is publicly known. He came out two years ago for selfless reasons, because Free Spirits needed a committee member who was out in order to sign some legal documents. Brick volunteered for this perilous task.

Last year, when Brick and his fiancée were on a trip to visit her parents, they crossed the U.S.-Canadian border. Brick was stopped at the border, handcuffed, told that he had no rights under international law, and taken to a dark, windowless room where he was interrogated for twelve hours straight. He'd probably still be there if his fiancée's lawyer hadn't demanded his release.

Brick's offense? He is Webmaster of BoyChat, so obviously he must also be a child pornographer, a child molester, and a child murderer.

Paul, I appreciate your willingness to take the time to talk with boylovers, but before you write any more posts here about the "joys of letting others know of your struggles," I think you need to do your homework and listen to a few of the stories here. You could start with the story of the boylover who was firebombed.

Gold Star
Webmaster
Crossroads

* * *

"Did you think I was Interpol?" asked the man he had known as Gold Star as they clattered their way down the iron steps from Johnnie's apartment building and turned left onto the sidewalk.

Reaction had arrived; Johnnie felt more than a little chagrin as he said, "It was because you called me Johnnie. Nobody calls me that in real life except my parents and my young friends."

"Would you prefer that I call you John?"

"No, Johnnie is fine. You can even call me White Rose if you like."

Delius threw back his head and laughed. Johnnie was dimly aware that, by speaking his nickname in a public place, he was breaking all the security rules he had set for himself long ago. But as they walked under the afternoon sun on this spring day, it hardly seemed to matter.

The sidewalks were crowded with the usual daytime traffic: families carrying shopping home, old men and women hunting through the trash cans for food, vendors and drug dealers selling their wares, and young men eyeing young women while lounging in front of liquor stores with no windows. Johnnie's street was at the far end of the theater district, and was populated by a mixture of black and Hispanic families and struggling white artists. The neighborhood had terrified Johnnie from the moment he moved in. Only the necessity of finding a cheap apartment – he passed on whatever earnings he could to his low-income parents – had made him brave the move from a small town where crime was rare at night to a city block where lack of crime was rare during the day. He had always planned to move to a better neighborhood once he received his next raise.

Yet now, as he watched Delius stride down the street with head held high – pausing only to exchange smiles with a fat woman selling scarves in booming Spanish, to restore a dropped ball to a young girl with mahogany skin, and to drop a dollar coin in a beggar's hat with a barely perceptible flick of the hand – Johnnie was suddenly seized with the irresistible conviction that this was the place where he was meant to live. Where else, after all, should a boylover live except among the other outcasts of society?

"I never knew where you got your nick," said Delius, stooping to pull back a terrier, leashed to a parking sign, that was venturing too close to the cars speeding along the road.

"My nickname has gotten me into trouble in the past," said Johnnie. "Conscientious Objector was suspicious of me for the first month after I arrived on the boards. He was convinced that my nickname was a Freudian slip, and that I was really a female CA."

Delius turned his smile toward Johnnie. When lit up, his face was as formidably bright as the sun, and now that they were out of the shadows of the apartment building, Johnnie could see that Delius's hair had glints of gold in it. He found himself wondering what Gold Star had looked like as a child.

"That sounds like typical C.O.," Delius replied. "What's the real reason for the nick?"

"It comes from a movie that impressed me when I was a child. There was a knight in it whose task was to give a white rose to the woman who was most important in his life, as a sign of his undying love. Since he was in love with several beautiful women, he had a hard time choosing between them. At the end of the movie, he gave the white rose to his grandmother, because he'd realized that she was the most important woman in his life. The movie captured my heart the first time I saw it. For weeks afterwards, I daydreamed of giving a white rose to the girl who meant the most to me."

"I wish I'd seen the film; I like the bit about the grandmother. —There it is."

Delius dodged a hopscotch game that was engrossing the attention of several girls on the sidewalk, and pointed toward a building at the corner that Johnnie had not noticed before. Like many of the buildings on this block, it was half in ruins; indeed, the front door seemed to be boarded up. The building's only elegant touch were the bay windows jutting out from the second and third stories, dating from a time before this part of the city had been abandoned to poverty.

"I still can't believe that you live only a block from me," said Johnnie. "It's just too incredible a coincidence."

Delius's mouth twitched as he looked over at Johnnie. "Coincidence?"

Johnnie was silent a moment as they passed a group of teenagers making a valiant attempt to hold a soccer game between the parked cars. Then he said, "You knew where I lived."

"There's only one Art Deco theater in this city," Delius pointed out, "so when you said that you lived in my city and that you could see an Art Deco marquee from your window, I came here to look. I figured that you lived in the building where you turned out to be, or else in the building next to it. But of course I couldn't go around knocking on doors and asking people whether they were White Rose, much less thrust myself on you uninvited."

"So you moved here for my sake?" Johnnie said incredulously as they squeezed their way through a gap in the passing cars.

"Well, I was looking for a new place to stay in any case, and when I saw the 'For Rent' sign I figured it was worth giving the place a look. Mind you, it did occur to me that if I ever came out to a BL in this city, it would be handy to have him living five minutes from me."

He flashed a quick grin at Johnnie, then directed his attention toward the man-high iron gate they were approaching, which blocked the entrance to an alley. Johnnie, turning around in time to see a woman and boy disappearing down the subway escalator across the street, felt his skin suddenly rough with goosebumps as he realized why Delius looked vaguely familiar.

"Do you arrive home at about nine p.m.?" he asked as they neared the padlocked gate.

"More or less. I attend a Web design class Monday through Thursday evenings at the public library. When I get home, I usually take a shower and eat lunch before going on the boards."

"Lunch?"

Delius grinned again. "I'm a night owl. That's what lets me give the world the impression that I live on the West Coast."

He opened the gate – its lock was shattered – and led Johnnie down the narrow gap between the buildings. The alley was filled with trash and urine and broken glass. Johnnie stepped carefully to avoid the decaying remains of a homeless cat.

"The alley is an added bonus to the accommodations," Delius explained. "It fulfills my lifelong ambition to lurk in dark alleyways."

"Do you invite many other BLs to come lurk with you?" Johnnie asked. The alley had widened; they were now at a point where Johnnie could see the gate at the end of the alley, and behind it the narrow service road and backyards of the houses on the next block, their lawns cluttered with hanging laundry and half-stripped machinery.

"Brick has a standing invitation to visit here, but his last attempt to enter the U.S. went awry." Delius steered Johnnie around the fallen drainpipe he had been about to trip over and gestured him toward a rusty fire escape running the length of his building.

"But what other BLs have you met in real life?" Johnnie persisted.

Delius gave his bright smile then. "Only you. Be gentle with me; I'm a virgin." He proceeded to race his way up the stairs, taking two steps at a time.

By the time that Johnnie reached him, he was struggling with three door locks. The door looked much like a window that had been cut open to the ground – which, in fact, it undoubtedly was. Unbolting the final lock, Delius said, "My landlord must be bribing the fire code inspectors to get away with a place like this, but he doesn't pry into his tenants' life, which is what is most important to me. Come enter my abode, said the spider to the fly."

So saying, he swung the door open and ushered Johnnie inside.

As he stepped inside, Johnnie had the momentary impression that he had just returned to the alley. He found himself standing in a kitchen that was draped with every object imaginable: a sweatsuit lounged upon the iron radiator; a pair of athletic shoes on the floor cozied up to a pile of dirty socks; a line of poster holders stood stiffly against an unplugged sound system, which looked a little bewildered, as though not sure what was expected of it; a backpack drooped atop a cracked wooden table strewn with computer magazines; a sink, proudly disdaining common tasks such as washing, cradled an armful of books; and a stack of used soda cans seemed determined to climb up the side of a computer. The computer was the only object that appeared certain of what work it was expected to undertake. Its screen was displaying a digital wallpaper showing a dark moonscape with a blue triangle logo upon the moon rocks, under a starless sky.

The whole room gave the impression of consisting of one raucous party of material objects, only recently disturbed. Even the cockroaches paused no more than a moment to inspect the new arrivals before they continued their climb up the soda can peak.

Delius chased them away with a shirt that looked as though it had been waiting to be cleaned for two or three months. "Sorry about the mess," he said. "I don't get many visitors, so I never try to disguise my abysmal housekeeping habits."

Taking a closer look at the room, Johnnie said nothing, for he was beginning to see signs that the neglect in this room was selective. The walls appeared to be freshly painted – not by the inspector-bribing landlord, presumably – and new light fixtures had been installed to supplement the weak light emerging from the alleyside window. If there was any uncertainty as to the source of the recent home repairs, none could be found as to the source of the neatness around the computer area. With the sole exception of the cans – which held almost a jaunty appearance, as though they were examples of modern art – the computer desk was immaculately kept. It was the only piece of new furniture in the place, and was topped not only with a hard drive, keyboard, and monitor, but also with a printer, scanner, combined answering machine and fax, speakers, and CD burner. Johnnie felt as though he had just interrupted Mission Control during a rocket launch.

Delius had opened the refrigerator, whose door was festooned with postcards of Renaissance Cupids and prints of old-fashioned boys playing with hoops. "Not much here," he announced. "I just finished breakfast. Shall I groom you with offerings of leftover junk food?"

"Not yet, thanks," Johnnie said. "Am I really the first boylover you've had visit you?"

"At the end of the day I give you a plaque of honor," replied Delius, shutting the refrigerator door decisively. "What about you? Have you met many boylovers in real life before?"

"Never," said Johnnie. "I only came onto BoyChat three months ago, remember." He hesitated, then added, "I did meet somebody in this city through the Internet—"

"Paul?" Seeing Johnnie's startled expression, Delius smiled. "Paul sent me an e-mail soon after he arrived on the boards, introducing himself, and giving me his address and phone number in case I should ever need 'support.' I didn't bite at the lure. I take it that you did?"

"Sort of," said Johnnie uneasily. "He doesn't know anything about me except my first name."

"If I were you, I'd be keeping my eye out for a plainclothesman trailing me home from these meetings. I trust you realize that Paul may be taping your conversations?"

"Look, he's not like that," said Johnnie weakly, like a lawyer called upon to defend an innocent man to a hostile jury.

"You know him best," said Delius, dismissing the matter with a wave of the hand, as he cleared a chair of its stack of computer paper. "Does anyone else know you're a boylover?"

"No, no one. I've been thinking of telling my parents."

"Well," said Delius, turning his back to place the paper next to dishes in a cupboard, "personally, I can't recommend the practice of coming out to one's family."

Johnnie waited for a moment for Delius to continue, then realized why he would not be doing so. Feeling his face grow warm with embarrassment, Johnnie turned his gaze away and walked over to stand at a doorway opposite the one he had entered through. It led to what must be the living room, though Delius seemed to be using it as a storage space for empty crates and spare computer equipment. The room was windowless except for a curtained alcove to the left. At the far end of the room was a door which must lead to the inner hallway of the building, but which was blocked by a sagging couch that looked as though it had been found on the curbside, awaiting trash removal.

"Do you want a tour?" asked Delius in his ear. "It won't take long."

Johnnie obediently followed him through the doorway at the far end of the kitchen, which turned out to lead to a hallway running parallel to the kitchen's far wall. The light was on in the hallway, and looking at the place where the light switch had once been, Johnnie realized that the hallway light was always on. The only other light came from a doorway further down the corridor.

Just opposite the kitchen entranceway was another doorway, with its door shut. Delius pushed this open, and for a moment Johnnie could see nothing. Then his eyes began to adjust to the darkness.

The room was black. This was not just because the floor-length curtains at the far end of the room appeared to beat back all light attempting to make its way through the windows, but also because the walls were painted black. Only with great difficulty could Johnnie see a battered dresser piled with disordered clothes, beside which lay a cot. No other furniture dwelled in the room except for a chair and typing desk. Atop the desk was a laptop, and it was turned so that Johnnie could see the e-mail he had sent Delius.

He was still trying to analyze the disorientation he felt when Delius said, "It's odd, isn't it? Like looking at a picture you've stared at for weeks, then seeing the picture suddenly come alive."

Johnnie nodded, tearing his gaze away from the e-mail to stare again at the walls. "I guess you like dark colors," he said.

Delius shrugged. "That was the sort of mood I was in when I moved here. Come see the other room; it's brighter."

The next room down the hallway was a bathroom; Johnnie caught only a brief glimpse of the rust-blackened sink and the window with glass so heavily frosted that little light penetrated into the room. Then he and Delius had reached the end of the hallway and were stepping through a door into lightness and warmth.

This room was larger than Delius's bedroom. Light flooded in through a series of streetside windows. Set into the midst of the windows was a bay window with a cushioned ledge broad enough to sit on. Going up to the window, Johnnie could glimpse through it the movie theater at the end of the street. Aside from the cushions, no decorations adorned the windows; they were uncurtained and were glittering with the early afternoon light.

The light fell upon a room lined with bookcases. From floor to ceiling they rose, bricks and worn planks. Some of the bricks looked as though they had only recently been transferred from a building site. They stood like sentinels in the room, but only two of the bookcases were filled. The books there looked shiny and new except for a few second-hand volumes, and even these, Johnnie discovered as he opened one of them and found a sales receipt stuck between pages, seemed to have been recently purchased.

He took a closer look at the text.

". . . and, look here! I really think you had better come and stop with me for a little time. It's very plain and rough, you know – not like Toad's house at all – but you haven't seen that yet; still, I can make you comfortable. And I'll teach you to row, and to swim, and you'll soon be as handy on the water as any of us."

The Mole was so touched by his kind manner of speaking that he could find no voice to answer him; and he had to brush away a tear or two with the back of his paw. But the Rat kindly looked in another direction, and presently the Mole's spirits revived again, and he was even able to give some straight back-talk to a couple of moorhens who were sniggering to each other about his bedraggled appearance. . . .

This day was only the first of many similar ones for the emancipated Mole . . .

Startled, Johnnie looked over his shoulder. Delius was on his knees, unpacking a pile of used books from the two paper bags in which they were stored. Another sales receipt fluttered out of one of the bags and fell onto the floor.

"What do you mean?" asked Johnnie.

"You didn't go straight for the boylove books."

"Oh." Johnnie put the book back onto the shelf and looked vaguely around. "I hadn't thought of that. Do you have books on boylove, then?"

Delius pointed without looking up from the book he was carefully dusting. "Bottom shelf. Most of them have discreet titles."

Johnnie crouched down to the bottom of the second bookcase and ran his eye over the volumes there: Pederasty and Pedagogy in Ancient Greece. Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature. Ganymede in the Renaissance. Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English "Uranian" Poets from 1889 to 1930 . . . There were a dozen more titles, but Johnnie reached for the scuffed book on Uranian poets.

This one, Johnnie learned by checking the back endpaper, was a library castoff; it had been discarded from the city university library the previous February. Johnnie skimmed the index for the words "Priest and the Acolyte." Then, as he began to trace the page in question, he said, "Most of your books seem to be on literature or art."

Delius didn't reply. When Johnnie looked up, he saw that Delius was sitting in the windowseat, book in hand, staring out the window. The silence lengthened; Johnnie stood up and joined him.

A family was emerging from the subway: a father, a mother, and a boy of about six or seven. The boy was holding his mother's hand while his other hand held a soft ice cream cone that was dripping chocolate onto his face. He was tugging at his mother, evidently desiring to run ahead, but she was absorbed in conversation with the man and took no notice. The three turned right, then disappeared around the corner.

Delius's gaze finally broke from the street scene. He looked over at Johnnie and smiled. "Sorry," he said. "I got distracted. That's the main problem with your street: too many pretty boys walking by."

"Problem?" Johnnie asked, letting his own gaze linger upon a sixteen-year-old passing by. It was the first time he had ever allowed himself to do this when another person was watching him, and he felt oddly exposed, like a virgin bride undressing in the presence of her new husband.

"It's like living next to a candy store when you're on a diet," Delius replied. "As for the books . . . Yeah, I double-majored in comparative literature and art history. I was planning to teach art in elementary school before I headed off on another path."

"You like the work you're doing better now, then?" Johnnie asked, sneaking a look at the books being unpacked. They were all on art history, he saw.

After a moment, Delius said, "Web design certainly pays better. Sorry, I haven't gotten any chairs in here yet. Would you like the windowseat?" He stood up, and as he did so, Johnnie caught a glimpse of the book he was holding: Plato's Symposium.

"I can imagine that it must be a formidable challenge finding furniture enough to fill this place," said Johnnie, declining the seat. "This room alone is bigger than my efficiency."

"It's too big a place for me, but I couldn't resist the lure of a two-bedroom." Delius moved over to one of the bookcases and slid the slim volume onto it. "Brick and I had discussed the possibility of him moving in here. His fiancée's in Africa till next summer, doing volunteer work for her denomination, and so he's sort of at loose ends till then. He thought it would be fun to spend half a year with another boylover. He changed his mind, though, after I told him I was on the registry. He didn't much relish the idea of opening his apartment door to find an angry parent perched on the doorstep, demanding to know whether he was the child molester."

A group of children ran by on the street below, calling to each other and laughing as they dodged their elders. There was a momentary lull in the sound of passing car wheels; Johnnie thought he could hear faintly the sound of the street vendor who always stood at his corner.

Johnnie said in a taut voice, "You molested someone?"

* * *

Delius gave a small shrug with one shoulder, as though he were casting off a burden too light to require two shoulders. His gaze was upon the books that he was straightening on the shelves. He pointed with one hand, saying, "File cabinet, top drawer. There's a folder near the front marked 'Prison Records.'"

Turning, Johnnie noticed for the first time a corner of the room that was bare of bookcases. Below a neatly hung art poster was a thigh-high file cabinet whose bottom door was rusted through. A stack of binders was perched upon the cabinet, perilously close to falling on the floor. Johnnie adjusted the stack before opening the top drawer of the cabinet.

The drawer contained two dozen file folders, most of them marked with names of art museums. The folder for which he was searching was easy to find; in contrast to the others, its edges were nibbled away, and it was grimy with dirt that came off onto Johnnie's hands as he pulled the folder out. He took a moment to wipe the folder clean with his handkerchief before he opened it.

After a minute spent scanning the first page, he looked up. Delius had disappeared from the room.

Johnnie found him sitting in the bedroom, his chair positioned so that almost nothing but his back could be seen from the door. The picture of the moonscape with a blue logo was on the screen of the laptop, but as Johnnie came to a standstill in the doorway, it disappeared in place of a white background with little boxes of colors to the side. Delius reached toward his mouse.

Johnnie said, "Five years for fondling a boy?"

"I got a light sentence," replied Delius without turning. "It was abuse of authority on top of statutory rape. I was his babysitter – at least, that's how his parents looked upon it. From my perspective, all those trips to the zoo were dates."

"But you did fondle him?" Johnnie was pressed with the feeling that it was of world-shaking importance to establish this fact.

"I kissed him." Delius's gaze remained upon the screen. "Repeatedly, over the space of two hours. Lips, cheeks, neck, hair. He kissed me back, of course. He was especially fond of my earlobes."

His voice was flat, like a soda that has lost its fizz. Johnnie could see his hand resting atop the mouse, the silver mark on his skin turned dark under the glow of the screen. His hand moved, using the mouse to guide the computer's arrow up to a small icon near the top of the page. A triangle suddenly appeared on the screen. Moving the arrow over to another part of the screen, Delius rotated the triangle until it was upside down.

"He was very happy and excited," he said as the arrow moved toward the top of the screen again. "He ran home and wrote in his diary – which his mother was secretly reading – about how this was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to him." Delius paused. A star had appeared on the screen beside the triangle. As Johnnie watched, Delius clicked on a device that made the star grow larger.

Delius said, "That was the killer for me, as it turned out. If Teddy had written about how miserable he was, then I think his parents would have contented themselves with demanding that I enter into therapy. As it was, I'd not only molested their son, but I'd brainwashed him into thinking he wasn't molested. Next thing I knew, the police were at my doorway at four a.m., handcuffs in hand."

Johnnie glanced at the page in front of him and said hesitantly, "It says 'fondling' here. Is kissing someone fondling?"

"'Lewd or lascivious act' is the actual wording of the law. That means, if Teddy got a hard-on from kissing me, I was a felon. Anyway, I wasn't in the sort of position where I wanted to argue with the police over the distinction between necking and petting." Delius was using the color palettes now to turn the star gold. "All I could think was that if I simply pled guilty to whatever charges they placed against me, I'd save Teddy from further questioning. I was too late for that, unfortunately."

He nudged the star onto the triangle. The two fit together snugly. Apparently satisfied, Delius clicked the mouse, and the triangle disappeared. Another click of the mouse saved the file.

"I saw Teddy at the sentencing," Delius said. "He was as pale as a drowned corpse, and he wouldn't look in my direction. Every time he was asked a question, he'd turn his head toward his parents, as though hoping that they'd supply the answer. It made a formidable image for the prosecuting attorney to use: abused boy worn down by the savage force of the pedophile looming over him. The attorney even brought out a picture of a child cowering within the embraces of a man, supposedly as part of the scientific evidence."

Still groping his way toward some sort of illumination, Johnnie said, "So you don't think you deserved the sentence?"

Delius's hand stopped, on the point of clicking the mouse. For a moment he was still, gazing upon the starless landscape that he had switched to. Then he half turned in the chair so that Johnnie could see his face, barely outlined by the light from the hallway.

"I was only twenty, Johnnie," he said in a voice very different from the flat one he had used before. "That's what you have to understand. I had just turned twenty, and I was a sophomore in college, gobbling down the classics and dreaming of a world where men and boys could love each other freely. I did have sense enough to see that it might not be the wisest move for a man to have sex between the thighs of a modern American boy, but I'd worked up this idealistic image – more taken from the modern world than classical times, alas – of Teddy and me being romantic partners, holding hands, snuggling close to each other, perhaps exchanging one or two chaste kisses. I wanted to be Socrates the chaste philosopher, lying beside my beloved and giving him my love without ever approaching the carnal aspects of it. The trouble was, I didn't know nearly as much as Socrates did about how powerful the demands are of the god Eros. The chaste kissing got out of hand; the beloved got what he wanted."

Delius looked down at the floor. Dropping his voice further, he said, "I had the idea that, since we were partners, I should give Teddy whatever he wanted. I didn't know nearly as much about Greek boylove as I thought I did. I didn't understand then about mentoring, and how the man has to play the guiding role in deciding what is best for the boy, just as a parent or teacher would. And it didn't occur to me what matters would be like on Teddy's side. If the police hadn't come and we'd carried out our secret affair, he'd have been drawn more and more away from his family and friends, because he would have had to hide all this from them. Or if he decided that he couldn't take that sort of separation, he would have been left with the horrible task of telling me that he wanted our affair to stop. It's hard enough when adults carry out illicit affairs. Anyone who would do that to an eight-year-old boy—"

He stopped. Faintly through the curtained window came the continued sound of cars passing, their wheels whirring like wind. After a time, Delius lifted his gaze until it was level with Johnnie's. He said, "I was the adult; he was the child, following my lead. Yeah, I deserved every minute of those five years. I only wish that the next cell could have been occupied by the people who made Teddy miserable for enjoying our kissing."

Delius's face held an expression that made Johnnie shrink away from eye contact, as though he were gazing upon a wound too raw to be touched. Johnnie dipped his eyes quickly and spent another minute scrutinizing the contents of the file folder. When he had heard Delius shift in his seat, Johnnie looked up and said, "You didn't get parole."

"No, the head of the prison's sex offender program recommended against it. He took a dislike to me from the start, because I refused to say that it was one hundred percent my fault that Teddy had ended up as hurt as he was. That didn't make me popular with the other prisoners either."

Delius clicked a button, and the gold star appeared on the screen, standing beside the blue triangle logo that was lying oblong on the floor. Delius spent a moment measuring the two objects next to each other, then switched back to the image editor.

Johnnie asked hesitantly, "Was it bad in prison?"

The star appeared on the white background. Delius clicked an icon, and the star began to stretch out, as though it were lying on the ground. Delius said, returning to his flat voice, "'Baby rapers' are lowest of the low in the prison hierarchy; I was treated accordingly. What kept me going was my hope of improving my life after I left prison. I was determined that my time in prison should count for something, not be a wasted five years."

The screen switched back to the landscape. Delius brought up the gold star, now lying flat like the blue logo, examined the screen for a moment, then switched back the image editor and began making adjustments. "One good thing about prison, it gives you time to think. I decided that the most important thing to do when I got out would be to find people like myself. That was part of my problem during my time with Teddy, you see. I didn't have anyone to talk to, who might have told me what sort of trouble I was heading toward. One of the other prisoners told me about NAMBLA, so as soon as I got out I spent six months tracking down the mailing information for NAMBLA, then took out a post office box under a false name and signed up for NAMBLA's membership."

"Were their meetings helpful?" Johnnie asked.

Delius shook his head as he began to move the gold star into a different position before saving it. "I never had the courage to attend any of their meetings. The closest one is three hours' drive from here in any case. I only subscribed to their newsletter, and after a while I began to lose interest. So many of the articles were about how to lobby to change laws and what the world would be like when boylove was legal again. That really wasn't the center of my life. I was most interested in finding a way to live my life now, to keep from kissing any more boys and to put my orientation to good use." He clicked the mouse. The star appeared on the screen, partly off-center from the triangle. Delius gave a sound of disgust and switched back to the image editor.

He continued, "After a couple of years, I just didn't bother to renew my NAMBLA membership. I drifted around from job to job for the next three years or so, growing progressively more unhappy because I couldn't talk to anyone about being a boylover. I even reached the point where I was considering having a relationship with a boy again, just so that I could have someone to talk to. Then I earned enough money to buy a computer and was able to get Internet access. My first day online, I went straight to the pedophilia section of one of the big Web directories. That's how I found the Free Spirits home page." He clicked on the mouse. The gold star appeared on the moonscape again; this time it was perfectly nestled within the outline of the blue triangle.

Delius spent a moment assessing the results. Satisfied, he stood up and walked toward the door. Johnnie, closing the folder, stepped back to let him through, then followed Delius into the kitchen. Delius paused at the refrigerator, pulled out two cans of cola, looked enquiringly at Johnnie, and tossed him one of the cans, keeping the other for himself.

He said, "It was like coming home. All those guys, going through the same things I was, posting tales about their day-to-day lives as boylovers."

"It was the same for me," said Johnnie, pausing from sipping at the cola. "I'd known, of course, that there must be others like me out there, but I'd always thought the other men were violent rapists and kidnappers, because that's all that the papers talked about. It just blew me away to discover so many pedophiles out there like myself, who didn't want to harm boys."

Delius nodded. "I got fired from the job I had at that time because I spent the first forty-eight hours at BoyChat glued to the screen, reading all the posts in the main index and the archives. The loss of the job didn't matter, as it turned out. A few of my earliest posts were about how I was dissatisfied with the design of some of the message boards sponsored by Free Spirits. Pretty soon I was offering concrete suggestions on how they could be altered. I guess the Free Spirits Committee got fed up with having to respond to my posts, because they finally said, "Fine. Then you do it." And the next thing I knew I was on the Free Spirits Committee as their Web designer. Then I started doing a bit of Web work for a company I'd temped for in the past, and the next thing I knew I was a professional." Delius put his cola aside, unopened. "Brick thinks that Free Spirits should seek certification as a computer training college. So many of its committee members end up becoming experts in computer skills."

"You never got your teacher's certificate," Johnnie said suddenly.

"As a convicted sex offender? Not a likely scenario. I didn't even bother to go back to college, because I didn't want to have to go through the hassle of explaining to the dean why the college should take me back."

"I was just thinking . . . You'd be able to meet more boys if you were a teacher. Have you had many young friends?"

Delius went over to stand by the table where Johnnie had placed the folder. He looked down at it, touching the grime on the folder. After a minute he said, "One. Teddy."

Johnnie found he couldn't speak. He hastily lowered the cola onto the counter next to a pile of opened bills. Looking up, Delius said, "That was another decision I made in prison. I would have liked to have done some more child care after I got out, and to do it properly this time. But no parent is going to want a sex offender babysitting their child, and if a parent had found out about me accidentally – by reading my name in the sex offender registry, for example – there would have been a scene, and the boy would have been the one to suffer most. So my conscience told me, 'Well, Gold Star, you blew your chance. Unless the laws change, you'll have to find other ways to occupy your mind.' So I've stayed away from boys ever since."

"Gods!" The word came out of Johnnie as a whisper, more like a prayer than at any other time in his life.

Delius's lips curved upward then. He said lightly, "They can't stop me from smiling at boys I pass in the street. When one of them smiles back at me, it makes my whole day."

Johnnie couldn't think of anything to say. He turned his attention to the soda can, gulping down the tingly liquid and fingering the smooth metal. Delius picked up the file folder and said, "You finished with this? I don't like leaving this lying around. Sometimes I have to invite someone in as I sign for a package, and occasionally the guy below me will forget his key and ask to be let in through my place."

Johnnie thought about this as he followed Delius back into the bright room with the books. "Are those the 'few visitors' you receive?"

Delius knelt down to open the file cabinet, saying, "That's quick of you. Yeah, my social life with adults is nothing to write home about either. That's why I've been taking this Web design class. I know more than the instructor does, but it gets me together with other people in real life who share my interests. Trouble is, I don't feel I can invite anyone over to this place, lest they notice something that screams boylove to them." He flicked his hand toward the poster above the file cabinet.

Johnnie stepped forward to take a closer look. The poster depicted a two-handled silver goblet with a relief on both sides. Swallowing, he moved yet closer to read the label.

The British Museum, London
The Warren Cup
Asia Minor 30 B.C.-20 A.D.
Side A: Man and youth coupling while boy peeks
Side B: Youth and boy coupling

He turned and tried to catch the binders that were toppling from the vibration of the shutting cabinet door. A black binder fell out of his grasp and landed on the floor, flying open.

Johnnie knelt down and began to scoop it up, then found himself staring. Before him on the page that lay open were hundreds of gold stars.

They were pasted below the dates of a small calendar, with each date separated from the rest by a tiny box. The stars overlapped each other, each of them covering a date; the entire year had been marked in this way. At the bottom of the page, where there was extra room, a much larger star had been affixed, as though to climax the rest.

The top of the calendar was imprinted with the year in question, while written above the year, in careful lettering, were the words, "Age 23."

He became aware that Delius was sitting cross-legged on the floor next to him, staring down at the stars without speaking. Johnnie said, "Is this where you got your nick?"

Delius nodded without looking up. "That's one of the more useful bits of advice I got from the offender recovery program I was forced to take in prison. The instructor suggested that we should reward ourselves for each day we didn't re-offend." He put a hand forward, touching the little foil stars. "When I was a kid, my mom used to put a gold star on the calendar every day that I behaved myself. I really loved those stars. So I decided to give myself a gold star every day that I didn't kiss a boy or anything else along those lines. I started the notebook right after prison, but I pre-dated it to when I was first arrested, because I wanted the prison time to be part of the change in my life."

He turned back to the first page. This was marked "Age 20," and every date on the page was marked with a star except for one day in late January. Delius pointed to it and said, "That's the day I kissed Teddy. I didn't get a big star at the end of the year; the big stars are rewards if I make it through an entire year without a break."

Johnnie turned the pages slowly. The stars were unbroken from that time on, with a large star affixed to the bottom of each page. When he reached "Age 25" he stopped and said, "Some of the stars here have black borders."

"Yes, I decided to give myself black-bordered stars on the days that I seriously withstood temptation in some way." Delius pointed to the first of the black-bordered stars, which occurred in the month of June. "I got that one just three weeks after I was released from prison. I was walking down the street late one night, and a boy appeared out of nowhere and asked whether I wanted my cock sucked. He was fifteen, well above my AOA, but Jesus, just for a moment . . . Fortunately, I came to my senses quickly. I took him to an all-night café nearby and bought him a milkshake and got him talking. Turns out he had run away from home and was earning food the only way he knew how. I managed to convince him to call the city's hotline for runaways, and I stayed with him till the hotline's car arrived."

Delius pointed further down the page, his silver-marked hand casting a shadow over the sunlit stars. "That star there— No, the one below it. That star represents a six-year-old boy who tagged me home like a puppy after I stopped and fixed his broken rollerblade. He would have come inside if I'd let him. So I hailed a passing police car and got him a ride home, then took a long detour from that point on to avoid his house."

He turned to the next page. "That star . . . Jesus. That star represents the incubus of my twenty-sixth year. I go to a gym sometimes that's usually safe for me, because it's in the business district, so only adults attend it. On this particular day, though, I walked into the changing room and found that the only occupant was an eleven-year-old boy, stark naked." Delius leaned back on his hands, staring at the ceiling. "Have you seen pictures of Donatello's statue of David? This boy was that way – like something you'd find in primordial Eden." He looked down at the page again, adding, "I must have broken the four-minute mile getting out of that gym. Then I had to force myself to go back, in order to warn the boy's father of the dangers of leaving his son alone like that. I give an awfully good lecture on the dangers of sexual predators, if I do say so myself." He grinned at Johnnie before turning back to the previous page and pointing to another black-bordered star. "I remember now what this one was. That was the day I ran across a little girl being bullied. She wasn't a snare to me, of course, but it turned out that she had a grateful brother . . ."

He continued on, recalling the story of each black-bordered star as Johnnie listened silently, watching Delius's scarred hand more than he watched the stars. He wondered to himself what struggle had taken place at the time Delius was arrested. Shying away from this thought, he concentrated his mind on the stories. After a certain point he realized that Delius, like a man on a desert isle who is deprived of all lasting contact with women, had stored these brief encounters with boys as the man on the desert isle might store images of women waving at him from passing ships. Each memory had been carefully hoarded, polished until it shined, and then set aside to take out again in moments of greatest need.

"Delius," Johnnie said suddenly, remembering a post, "do any of those black-bordered stars stand for Teddy?"

Delius broke off his story, pausing a moment to lick his finger and paste back a star that was beginning to peel off. Then he said, without looking at Johnnie, "No. I moved here from California so that Teddy wouldn't get himself in trouble by searching me out." He continued, as though there had been no pause, "So his parents said to me, 'Why don't you move in with us and teach our son better English?' They only spoke Spanish and were suspicious of the police; I knew they'd never even heard of the sex offender registry. And I heard my conscience say, 'Gold Star, this is the sweetest temptation that will ever come your way, but if you give way on this, the next thing you know you'll be giving in to their requests to tuck the boy into bed, and then it will be just one step to tucking both of you into bed . . .'"

The pages continued to turn. At first the calendars were printed on coarse paper that had been pasted onto bond paper – seemingly they were torn from phone books – but after age thirty a change occurred. Now the calendars were printed from a computer, and the simple beauty of each number, letter, and box put the phone-book calendars to shame.

Something about the painstaking care of the design triggered a memory in Johnnie. As Delius reached the end of another story, Johnnie said, "You know, you remind me a lot of Paul."

Delius shifted his gaze to look at Johnnie. He was not smiling. "I trust you meant that as a compliment," he said. Before Johnnie could think what to reply, Delius looked down at the binder again and said, "I used to carry this around with me. I'd take it out at odd moments to look at it, whenever I was feeling discouraged and felt as though I weren't accomplishing anything with my life."

Johnnie looked again at the page labelled "Age 34." The stars ended in the first week of December. Turning the page, Johnnie saw that "Age 35" was blank.

Delius gave a small shrug. "I stopped adding stars last December. At a certain point it began to seem like a meaningless achievement, just to not hurt a boy. Mind you, I know that the work I'm doing online is making a difference in boys' lives. I'm helping keep intact the sanity of other boylovers, so they can go out and help boys. But still . . ."

He closed the book, and as he did so, Johnnie saw that part of the binder's gold cover had been eaten away, presumably by whatever beast had eaten at the file folder. He took a closer look and saw that, yes, the outline of the nibbling here matched that of the prison record folder.

His thoughts were snatched away from this as Delius rose to his feet, turning the binder on its edge to prop himself up. Johnnie noticed for the first time how thick the binder was. "How many boxes do you have to fill?" he asked. "I mean, mentally, even if you're not pasting in the stars any more."

Delius smiled as he placed the binder back on the file cabinet. As he did so, one of the bent edges of the cabinet snagged the long sleeve of his turtleneck and pulled the sleeve back, revealing that the scar on his hand extended onto his arm. Delius pushed the sleeve back in an automatic manner and said, "Oh, I figured that out at the start. Assuming that the laws don't change, and assuming that I live my life to its normal span, I'll have to earn myself twenty thousand gold stars."

Johnnie opened his mouth; it remained open. After a moment he said, with repressed fury, "Gods! They give medals to people just because they write a good book. And all you will get at the end of your life is an obituary entitled, 'Child Molester Dies.'" He furiously drank down the last of his cola and rose to his feet, feeling the heat surge through him.

Delius had turned away from the cabinet. He looked at Johnnie for a moment, his mouth serious, then said softly, "White Rose, don't go down that path."

"What path?" Johnnie moved out of the shadow of the dark corner, back into the bright warmth. The afternoon sun had shifted; now it was falling onto a group of pictures Johnnie had not noticed before, because they were hanging on the wall next to the door. The pictures appeared to be photocopies of illustrations from different children's books: a pig and a spider, a pig and a bear, a cat and a mouse . . . Johnnie wondered what the unifying theme was.

"The path to self-pity." Delius's voice was quiet. "It'll cripple you. I can't tell you how many boylovers I've heard whine on and on about how they're underappreciated. Well, other people in this world do admirable things and never receive notice. Country doctors slave away to help low-income families, social workers risk their lives in inner-city slums . . . Compared to the work they do, staying celibate for a few decades is child's play."

"Yes, but everyone admires doctors and social workers. Us they despise." He was surprised, as he spoke, how bitterly his words emerged. He had not guessed that he was holding this in. Somehow, the very act of meeting another boylover face-to-face was bringing out emotions that, until now, he had kept carefully in check.

Delius said swiftly, "Johnnie, stop. I mean it. This isn't the path you want to take. I nearly went down this path when I was in prison, and again last December; I painted the room black not long after that. But it's the easiest road to self-destruction. There are hundreds of boylovers like that, feeding their hearts on their hatred of society. They've grown inward, like a toenail. At best, they'll show some concern for other boylovers and boys – at worst, they'll think of nothing but themselves. Jesus, Johnnie, if you could see what they're like. It scares me sometimes, the way Conscientious Objector keeps going on about how we're all victims of a holocaust. A holocaust? He has a good job, a good place to live, plenty of food – what does he know about being sent to starve in a prison camp filled with gas chambers? He says boylovers are the most oppressed minority in the world. Does he really think we're worse off than the victims of genocide? Than the innocents who die of hunger and disease because no one cares about them? Johnnie, if you want to let society destroy you, take that path. Let how society treats us turn you into a self-centered boylover who thinks only of his own pain."

Johnnie realized that he was crushing the soda can. He released his fingers quickly from the crumpled metal and said stubbornly, "But we are worse off than some other people."

"Sure, and there's no problem with admitting that, provided that we remember that other people are undergoing their own pain." Delius's voice had turned calm again. He took the can from Johnnie and said, "Do you know why I became Webmaster of Crossroads? To remind myself that I wasn't the only person in the world with problems. I own a book I wish could be read by every boylover at Crossroads who complains about how oversensitive people like Concerned & Angry are. It tells about the history of child abuse in the U.S., and it describes how, until recently, child abuse victims were ignored or despised or told that it was all their own fault. Of course people like Concerned & Angry are mad at us. All those people in the child abuse industry have been fighting their own mini-holocaust. When I read one of Concerned & Angry's posts, my conscience tells me, 'You could become like this if you get so focussed on your own suffering that you don't think about other people's suffering.' A fate worse than death, needless to say," he added with a twitch of the lips.

Johnnie spent some time tracing with his eye the pictures on the wall. After a while, he said, "Could I borrow that book you mentioned?"

Suddenly Delius's smile was back, as bright as the gold star for which he had named himself. "Sure. Actually, I lost my copy of that book a while back, but I can order another copy for both of us." He clapped Johnnie lightly on the shoulder. "Jesus, what sort of host am I? I invite you round, then give you the story of my life and lecture you as though you were a loved boy. Come out into the kitchen, and I'll order a pizza for us. Is it true what you said in your post at BoyChat last week, that you had a girlfriend in middle school? Did you love her?"

They returned to the kitchen, where Delius placed the crumpled can carefully atop the other cans. Johnnie found that his gaze was lingering upon books in the sink. As Delius picked up the phone to call for pizza delivery, Johnnie placed the books aside, turned on the hot water, and began clearing dirty dishes from the kitchen table.

* * *

No rape fantasies this week!
Posted at BoyChat by True Boylover on Saturday, April 14, at 7:48 PM

I didn't have any rape fantasies this week! I did have one murder fantasy, but I'm sure that next week I'll even be able to get rid of those!

It's been SO long since I've gone a week without these fantasies, and it's all due to you guys. White Rose, you were right when you said that meeting real boys would help me to stop fantasizing, because I'd be confronted by the reality of what boys are actually like. When I remember B's sweet face, I can't even THINK of raping him or any other boy!

My second piece of good news is that I now have a JOB flipping hamburgers at a local fast-food joint. (I won't say which fast-food restaurant. I'm sorry about my previous post, Brick, and I promise I'll try to remember the security rules from now on.)

So all and all, things are looking up!

Love,
TB

Chapter Five

Alt Text

What is a minor-attracted adult's duty to God?
Posted at the Christian Boylove Forum by Paul on Wednesday, May 9, at 6:01 PM
In reply to Boylove in the Bible posted by Brick

Brick, you wrote:

> Being both a boylover and a woman-lover, I have a number of girl-lover friends, so I'd ask that you stop implying that child-love is identical with homosexuality.

I apologize for giving the impression that I believe that. Of course I know that most same-gender-attracted people are not minor-attracted and that many opposite-gender-attracted people are minor-attracted. All I meant to suggest was that for certain people, such as my friend, the same-gender attraction and the attraction to minors are intertwined. For example, I am both a lover of the Bible and a lover of religious art. I know that for some people, these impulses appear separately, but in my life they are intertwined.

> I do not attend church, but I consider myself a follower of Jesus

It was quite hard for me to find an accepting faith community, and I'm sure the same must be true for many people here as well.

> and I have made a study of this. The first thing you must understand is that context is all-important. One mustn't adopt a Fundamentalist literal reading that deadens Scripture.

I'm glad to see that we agree about this. In fact, my objection to the pro-boylove readings of the Bible I have seen on this board is that I believe they do not take proper account of the ancient Jewish context but instead project modern concepts of love and sexuality back onto people who thought very differently about such matters.

> There are a number of age-differentiated couples in the Bible, such as Jonathan and David ("Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women"), Naomi and Ruth ("Wither thou goest, I will go"), Jesus and John ("that disciple whom Jesus loved"), and the young man in the loin cloth who is mentioned in the Gospel of Mark and is said in an alternative version of this gospel (recorded by St. Clement of Alexandria) to have spent the night with Jesus.

As for the last reference, I think the noncanonical Gospels are cryptic and often heretical, and I believe that the Church was guided by the Holy Spirit when it rejected them in favor of the canonical Gospels.

Your first three references seem to me to be references to philia or agapé rather than eros. This is where the historical context is important. In our culture, eros is considered the supreme love, so phrases such as "Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women" and "Wither thou goest, I will go" and "that disciple whom Jesus loved" all suggest to us that erotic desire is present.

But matters were different in ancient times. Leaving aside the pederasts – who seem to have been an aristocratic minority in the ancient world – references to supreme love in ancient times nearly always referred to philia. A man who told his friend, "You are more important to me than any women," was not suggesting to his friend that they should go to bed together. Rather, he was expressing the depth of importance that friendship love played in his culture.

You can see this quite clearly in John 21, in which Jesus keeps asking Peter, "Do you love [agapé] me?" and Peter keeps thinking that Jesus is asking, "Do you love [philia] me?" Peter assumes this because philia is the supreme love in his society. If a man in our society asked another man, "Do you love me?" everyone observing the scene would naturally assume that eros was being talked about.

Whether in ancient times or now, Jesus must have a very hard time impressing upon his followers that the supreme love is not philia or eros, but rather agapé.

Incidentally, this strong admiration of philia lasted until Victorian times. In the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon for two unmarried men (or two unmarried women) to set up household together for life, in a domestic companionship that was as strong as marriage. Pro-gay historians tend to interpret this as a "domestic partnership" in the modern sense, but while there's no doubt that some of these arrangements were masks for erotic entanglements, I think it's an exaggeration to suggest that all of them were. In those days, there was nothing strange about wanting a lifelong partnership based on philia, and some of these men may even have aimed for agapé.

> Some people, of course, have theorized that Paul condemned pederasty in I Corinthians 6:9 and I Timothy 1:10, but I don't think this reading stands up to the test.

I agree with you. I believe that Paul's terms arsenokoitai and malakoi are not references to pederasts and boys (what would be the point of condemning the boys?) but instead are intended as general references to homosexuality.

> The most important reference to boylove in the Bible is one that you probably don't know about. Some years ago, a scholar (see the bibliographical reference below) proved that the word translated into English as "servant" in the Matthew version of the tale of the centurion and his ailing servant was in fact mistranslated. I gather that you know Greek, so you'll be aware that the English root ped-/paed- is derived from the Greek word pais/paidos. "Servant" is a possible translation for this word, but its primary meaning is "boy." The scholar, gathering together the various uses of pais in ancient literature, showed that a first-century readership, exposed as it was to Roman pederasty, would naturally assume that a reference to a Roman and his entimos pais meant that the centurion was engaged in a pederastic relationship with his "beloved boy." It is significant that Jesus nowhere condemns this relationship.

This is a fascinating theory, and I'm very glad that you told me of it. If true (I shall have to hunt up the article you mention), it seems to me to fit well with other stories of Jesus' encounters with sinners, such as the adulterous woman, the Samaritan woman at the well, the "sinner" who washes his feet (possibly a prostitute), and Matthew Levi the tax collector. In every case, Jesus delivered no lectures to the person on their sinful ways; at most, he told the adulterous woman to sin no more. Instead, he seems to have depended on the force of his own character and manifest godly love to impress upon the person how wonderful their life could be if they turned back to God's ways. This tactic seems to have disconcerted his enemies quite a lot, and we witness them grumbling, "Why does he dine with sinners?" Obviously they'd be far more comfortable if Jesus delivered a haranguing lecture in the manner that John the Baptist did.

I, alas, am all too prone to lecture, as you may have noticed. Even so, a gay friend of mine who is Christian asked me a couple of years ago why I'd never given him a stern lecture on the sinfulness of sodomy. I told him, "If the life that I and other ex-gays lead doesn't convince you that we've chosen the higher path, then nothing I say will convince you."

That's why I won't go on in this post about why I believe that, even if it should become legally possible, it would be wrong for you to have sex with a boy. Instead, I'll say, "Look at the life and character of At Peace or any other boylover who is celibate for moral reasons. Then look at the life and character of any boylover whom you have good reason to believe is sexually active. The comparison speaks for itself."

> Nowhere does Jesus say, "It is sinful to be a boylover."

We're in agreement, of course, that it is not sinful in itself to have sexual feelings toward children – though no doubt in a world unaffected by the Fall, such feelings would not arise. Of course there is Jesus' injunction that "whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart," but I use the King James translation because you have rightly pointed out that the key word here (which appears in the Greek) is "to," It is sinful to look at someone you cannot marry in order to lust after them. I trust that neither you nor I sin when we find ourselves having involuntary feelings of attraction toward boys or men.

But while involuntary feelings are not sinful, it seems to me that feelings which are voluntarily encouraged are a form of action that is subject to moral scrutiny. When some boylovers here say, "It's wrong for me to have sex with a boy, but it's all right for me to fantasize about having sex with him," this seems to me to ignore Jesus' very clear warning that true sinfulness lies in the heart. If your heart and mind are directed toward God, then impulses that your body feels are not sinful, provided that you do not act on them. But if you never sin with your body but you sin with your heart, it is sin just the same.

So this complicates the question of whether it is sinful to be a boylover. It all depends on what you mean by being a boylover. Do you mean that you have feelings of eros toward boys and that you are attempting to sublimate those feelings into agapé? If so, then (in my view) nothing could be more praiseworthy. But I gather that some of you mean more than that: you mean that you should cultivate the eros, if not in deed, then in thought. And this seems to me to be perilously close to committing adultery in your hearts.

But of course Dante fell in love with a married woman and wrote love poems to her and ended up in Paradise, so this is certainly a difficult issue. I'd love to hear whether you have more thoughts on this.

Paul (the sinner, not the saint)

Divine discipline
Posted at the Christian Boylove Forum by At Peace on Wednesday, May 9, at 9:12 PM
In reply to What limits should I create? posted by White Rose

I'm not sure I can suggest any simple rules on this matter; I think that everyone has different limits. For example, I made a decision early on that I would not look after any boys if it meant being left alone in a house with them. My reasoning was that, if I were a heterosexual non-pedophile, I wouldn't spend the night alone in a house with my girlfriend. But I know boylovers who feel they have the self-control to do this sort of child care, just as I know men who can stay overnight in their girlfriends' guest rooms without anything untoward occurring.

On the other hand, I have no qualms about babysitting my brother's five-year-old daughter, since I'm not attracted to girls. If I were a girl-lover, my position would be different.

What I think is most important is not determining rules but rather finding a way to measure, at each moment, whether you are remaining within the discipline you have set for yourself. Paradoxically, coming up with a list of rules defeats this effort, because it gives you a false sense of security. You think, "Oh, this doesn't break any rules, so it must be okay."

What I've found most useful is to ask myself, whenever I have any doubts, "What would Jesus think if he saw me doing this?" This has never failed to help me. Since you're not Christian, maybe you could pick the person you most respect – your mother, for example, or your boss – and imagine that person looking over your shoulder as you spend time with your young friend. In that way, your invisible guardian will provide a more objective judgment of your actions than your own impulses.

Does this help? If you can think of any other ideas, I hope you'll share them with us so that we can benefit by what you've learned.

In Christ's Name,
At Peace with the Lord
Webmaster of CBF

Raising boys properly
Posted at the Christian Boylove Forum by Brick on Thursday, May 10, at 4:30 PM
In response to The Church's view on sexuality posted by Paul

Don't we need to go back a step further? I think that we should consider, not only what the denominations are saying about sex, but whether what they are saying is right.

It seems to me that what the denominations need to recognize is that our society has gotten a muddled idea of what it means to introduce a person to sex, and that this is damaging, not only children, but also adults. Let me give you an analogy: Here in North America, children are forbidden from drinking alcohol. As a result, their first introduction to drinking comes when they enter university. The result? At my university, binge drinking, drunk driving, and other forms of alcohol abuse were rampant. Because these men and women entered into drinking with no prior preparation, at a time when they had no supervision or guidance from their elders, they naturally made many horrible mistakes.

Now contrast this with the attitude that some European countries take toward drinking. Children are introduced to alcohol at a very young age. The wine is well-watered, of course; children aren't expected to drink in the same manner as adults. Gradually, under the supervision of adults, they are trained to become accustomed to the properties of alcohol and to learn how to use wine without abusing it. Because of this, an eighteen-year-old Frenchman is much less likely to abuse alcohol than an eighteen-year-old American.

My contention is that the situation is the same with sex. At the moment, we plunge adults into sex with no prior training, much less supervision by their elders. No wonder the divorce rate is so high! What the denominations ought to be encouraging is a gradual introduction to sex during childhood, under the guidance of those who are old enough to have made mistakes and learned from them. Of course, each stage would have to be age-appropriate: a very young child would only be ready for kisses and a little light stroking of the skin, while a young person near adulthood would be ready to learn about intercourse (vaginal, anal, or intercrural). And of course one would have to take into account the individual's readiness. And here is where real advances could be made.

One of the worst aspects of the age-of-consent laws is that they assume that everyone develops at the same rate. Some twelve-year-old boys are ready for oral sex, and some thirty-year-old men are not. By getting rid of the age-of-consent laws and judging each person on a case-by-case basis, we could say, "No, even if most twenty-five-year-olds are ready for sex, this particular person is not." Or, "Yes, those of us who have been supervising this particular person's development believe that he is ready to go on to oral sex." That's how we handle matters in all other walks of life. It's a shame that the denominations ever got the idea that sexuality is different from other aspects of a person's life.

Brick
Webmaster and All-Round Dogsbody
BoyChat

Love-life versus love for life
Posted at the Christian Boylove Forum by Paul on Thursday, May 10, at 7:09 PM
In response to Raising boys properly posted by Brick

Brick, I hope that you do not consider me evasive if I don't address directly the argument you have in your post. The reason I'm unwilling to do so is that it rests upon assumptions that are not Christian. It's as though I were trying to discuss non-Euclidean geometry with you, and you kept referring to an axiom that is only found in Euclidean geometry.

It is an axiom of the pagan and secular worlds that sex outside of lifelong union is acceptable. No Christian can concur with this assumption (in my humble opinion). I agree when you say that we do not have any conveniently direct command from Jesus on many matters related to sexuality. We don't have any Gospel passages where he says, "Thou shalt not have gay sex," or, "Thou shalt not have sex with a child." But if one thing is clear, Jesus did say (in Matthew 5 and 19, Mark 10, and Luke 16), "Thou shalt not divorce."

So central is this directive in Jesus' teachings that I would argue that the most serious sexual sin occurring within the churches today is not homosexuality but divorce. Even liberal Christians recognize the importance of lifelong unions in the Church's life; other than a few radical Christians, they all base their arguments upon this. Pro-gay Christians argue that homosexuals are just as capable of entering into lifelong unions as heterosexuals are. Proponents of premarital sex argue that couples shouldn't have to wait for the formality of a wedding before they begin their lifelong union together. Africans who believe that polygamists should be allowed to keep all their wives when they become Christians argue that having two wives is a lesser evil than divorcing one of them.

In fact, the only group of reasonable Christians I've ever met who argue in favor of temporary sexual unions are some of the participants at this board. This "training" you speak of is, when you strip away the veneer of your words, simply a sexual union that will end in divorce. If you "married" a boy rather than a woman, you could not stay married to him beyond his reaching adulthood.

I know that some of you folks will argue that a few boylovers and loved boys have stayed together for life. But as At Peace and some others here have argued previously, can a twelve-year-old boy really make such a momentous decision as to enter into a lifelong union? Child marriages were one of the scourges of the ancient and medieval Church, and I don't think it's a custom for which we should be encouraging a revival.

Brick, I'm sure it's no accident that Jesus requires us to engage in eros for life or not at all. It's all of a piece to what he is showing us about love in general. If I get married and then abandon my wife because I've lost interest in her, then the chances are I'll do the same with God. By practicing eros and philia for life, we learn to practice agapé for life. That is the sort of love that God wants us to practice: the sort of love he holds for us.

Or to put it in the language of Euclidean geometry: if you're not faithful for life to the person you love, then you won't be faithful for life to the cause you believe in.

Paul (the sinner, not the saint)

* * *

"Slash childabuse – that's one word," said Johnnie. "Slash tips dot HTML."

He paused to let Milano type the words of the Web address. The boy hit the return key with a flourish and waited for the page to load, observing, "You had the URL all memorized."

"I give it out a lot," said Johnnie, watching as the words "Kids' Tips for Staying Safe in Cyberspace" appeared on the Macintosh screen. "I post at a message board that has the word 'boy' in its title. Every now and then, a boy will wander onto the board who clearly thinks that this is a forum set up for kids to chat in. The Webmaster and some of the regular participants will explain to him right away that he's mistaken and give him advice on where he can go to find forums for children and youth, but what concerns me the most is that many of these boys don't seem to know anything about Internet safety. They'll post their full names and addresses, and the Webmaster will have to go in and edit this information out of the post. So I usually give out this link to the boys before they leave." He looked down at Milano who was perched on the edge of his seat, staring intently at the screen. "Didn't they show you a list like this at school?"

"I suppose," said Milano. "I didn't pay attention."

His eyes were wide as he stared at the list. His left hand, which he usually cupped over his cheek when he sat down, had slipped, revealing the dark mark. Watching him, Johnnie said, "Try to blink every now and then. You don't want your eyes to dry out."

"Oh, right." Milano obediently fluttered his lashes several times. He had his father's straight eyelids and his mother's long, dark lashes, curling upward like a bird in flight. Johnnie took a step backwards so that he could only see the back of Milano's head and said briskly, "The rules are pretty simple. They basically boil down to three: you shouldn't give out real-life information about yourself, you should never agree to meet someone in real life unless you have your parents' permission, and you should keep in mind that people aren't always what they appear to be on the Internet. Sometimes people who appear quite nice outwardly are in fact very dangerous inwardly."

Milano turned in his seat, letting his arm drape over the back of his chair as he looked up at Johnnie. "I suppose," he said hesitantly, "that the same is true the other way round. I suppose some people who appear quite awful from the outside are actually nice inside."

Johnnie was captured for a moment by a vision of an FBI agent reading BoyChat, then bringing out a list labelled "Dangerous Online Predators" and adding the name "White Rose" to the record. Then he saw that the boy was still watching him intently, and he realized why Milano had asked this.

Milano appeared to decide in that moment that he would not receive an answer, or at least that the man in front of him was too polite to give an honest one, for he turned his gaze swiftly away, pulling a book off the computer desk and flipping through the pages listlessly. Johnnie took a step forward and caught a page that was turning. Several figures were depicted on it: a square within a circle, a circle within a triangle, and a triangle within a triangle. Johnnie asked, "Where is the circle?"

Milano raised his head; he was squinting with puzzlement. He pointed to the circle on the page.

Johnnie shook his head. "That's not a circle. That's a picture of a circle. I want a real circle."

Milano looked around the room for a moment before pointing to a scuffed soccer ball that lay next to his bed. Johnnie shook his head again. "That's not a circle. That's only something that has the shape of a circle."

"Where's the circle, then?" asked Milano, cocking his head to the side.

Johnnie pointed to Milano's brow, where the dark hair fell over equally dark eyebrows. "Here. The only real circle is in your mind. That's the only circle that's perfect; everything that we see in the world is just an imperfect attempt to imitate the perfection that is within."

A smile slowly rose onto Milano's face, lifting the skin and changing the shape of the mark on his cheek. "Oh," was all he said.

Suddenly aware of the muted scuffle of Milano's younger sisters in the next room, Johnnie took an automatic step backwards and said, "There are links at the bottom of the safety page that lead to more safety tips. You might want to read them when you get the time."

Milano turned back to the computer eagerly and scrolled down until the links to the additional pages appeared. Johnnie, placing his hand on Milano's shoulder and leaning forward, pointed at the screen, saying, "You needn't read this now, but this is a page I refer a lot of kids to; it's about not taking rides from strangers. And this one tells what to do if someone grabs you while you're walking down the street. Oh, and this one has some good hints too."

Milano leaned forward to see better and read aloud, "'What to Do if Someone Touches You in a Way You Don't Like.'"

"What's going on here?"

Johnnie, who had been on the point of removing his hand from Milano's shoulder, snatched it back as though he had been touching a hot oven. He whirled around to look at the woman standing in the doorway, her hands and apron covered with flour and tomato sauce.

"Mama!" cried Milano indignantly. "You're supposed to knock before you come in."

"And you, young man, are supposed to ask permission before you go on the Internet. But I suppose you're not to blame this time." She flashed a smile at Johnnie as she walked forward.

"I'm sorry," said Johnnie weakly. "We were looking at a math history site his teacher recommended, and then we got to talking about the school rules for Internet use."

"Is that the math site?" asked Sandra, looking over her son's shoulder. "Oh, good! I'm glad you're showing Milano that. I get scared every time he goes on the Internet. You hear so many stories about pedos grooming and luring kids."

"What's a pedo?" asked Milano, who was carefully bookmarking the page.

Sandra lifted her eyebrows and looked at Johnnie. "Perhaps you'd better explain. You're better qualified."

Johnnie had a sudden collapsing sensation as though he were falling into a dark pit. Sandra laughed and said, "Whoops! I worded that badly, didn't I? I only meant that you're a man and therefore better qualified to discuss the birds and bees thing with a boy than I am."

Johnnie looked over at Milano, who was backing up the screen to the math history site and appeared to be taking no notice of the conversation. He had a brief vision of sitting down with Milano and saying, "Now, let me explain about pedophiles. You see, some men fall in love with women, and some men fall in love with other men, and some men fall in love with boys . . ."

"Wouldn't it be better to have his father discuss such matters with him?" he asked.

"That'll be the day," Sandra said tartly. "But I'm sorry, John; I didn't mean to burden you with parental duties. I already feel guilty about how you spend so much time helping Milano with his math homework."

"I look forward to it," said Johnnie, enjoying one of those brief moments when he could be entirely honest. "The numbers I deal with at work are incredibly dull. It's a relief to go back to the mathematics I loved as a youngster. And of course it's a joy to work with an eager pupil like Milano." He hoped his remark sounded sufficiently polite and formal.

"Well, even if I can't pay you, I can at least give you a decent dinner," said Sandra, wiping her hands clean on her apron. "I came to tell you that the food will be ready in fifteen minutes. Milano, non importunare il Signor Steadman."

"Mama!" cried Milano in anguish, turning in his seat.

Sandra dimpled as she looked back at Johnnie. "If he is a pest, don't hesitate to tell me. If he had his way, I bet he'd have you playing computer games with him half the night, when all you want is to get home and go to bed." She gestured toward Milano's bed.

"Not at all," said Johnnie faintly.

"Mr. Steadman!" said Milano, tugging at his sleeve. "Look here! The math history site has a page on a guy named Plato, and he said the same thing you did about circles. And they have links to his complete writings." He clicked the mouse and started reading, "The Meno and the Republic and the Symposium . . ."

"Oh, gods," said Johnnie, yet more faintly. Sandra had gone. He said in his best Stern Tutor voice, "Let's get back to business. There's a page on the math history site about Euclid; he's closer to what we're looking for . . ."

He leaned over to the mouse and clicked on the back button firmly, his mind once more absorbed in thoughts of the ideal and the imperfect.

* * *

Delius, leaning back against the cushions of Johnnie's day bed, scrutinized the photograph for a moment before saying, "The beloved."

"What?" asked Johnnie, pausing as he leaned forward to pour more cocoa into Delius's cup.

"That's what Milano means – didn't you know? Conscientious Objector ran a survey at BoyChat last year: 'Best Names for a Loved Boy.' Milano was one of the names mentioned. He's Italian?"

"Half Italian; his father's Asian-American. He visits his father on the weekends."

Delius looked up then. "He regards you as a father figure?"

"I think so. At least, I think he believes I'm interested in his mother. I've tried to put across to him that I'm not interested in her in a romantic way, but I'm not sure how successful I've been."

Delius looked back down at the picture. "You took this?"

Johnnie shook his head. "His mother did. He gave it to me right under her nose; she didn't seem to mind."

Delius chuckled softly as he accepted the mug from Johnnie's hand. "Imagine if she knew."

"She asked me today to tell Milano about pedophiles."

"Jesus!" Delius threw back his head and gave a hoot of laughter. Cocoa spilled into his lap, narrowly missing the photograph. "I trust that she didn't ask you to give a dramatic presentation."

He accepted a paper napkin from Johnnie and dabbed at his jeans, while Johnnie rescued the picture. "Most of the time I don't even think about it," Johnnie said. "He and I are so absorbed in lessons. But every now and then . . . He smiled at me for the first time today. My heart just about stopped."

"Hmm." Laying aside the mug and napkin, Delius picked up the photograph again. After a moment, in which Johnnie carefully watched his expression for clues, Delius said, "His face is unique."

"That's exactly what I think!" Johnnie exclaimed, his voice rising from pleasure. "The first time I saw him, all I could think was, 'Gods, he's gorgeous!' I suppose some people would consider that mark a birth defect, but I hope he never gets plastic surgery. He looks so different from the other boys – it's wonderful."

"Unique in his beauty." Delius raised his gaze from the picture and smiled.

"Yes." Feeling warmed, Johnnie leaned forward and tossed the soaked napkin into the wastebasket nearby. Absentmindedly, he ordered the cocoa pitcher and mugs so that they were in line with Delius's laptop, sitting open to the Crossroads index page. Next to him, Delius said, "You're so wonderfully organized. Could I borrow a few of your neatness genes? I'd be glad to give you a few of my messiness genes in exchange. . . . You know, I could turn this into a wallpaper for your computer, if you like."

Startled out of his thoughts, Johnnie jerked round to look at Delius. The latter raised his eyebrows and said, "You needn't look so shocked. It's no worse than keeping a picture of your girlfriend on your desk."

"I suppose so," replied Johnnie uneasily. "It's just . . . I love how Milano looks, but that's not the most important thing between us."

"Mm, yes." Delius put the picture down by his side and reached for the mug. "Well, I can see why you're always busy in the early evenings. Now I know who's the rival." He flashed a smile at Johnnie as he leaned back.

Johnnie said uneasily, "I'm sorry. I know I haven't been doing much moderating during the weekdays. I'd be willing to quit the committee . . ."

"Don't be silly. Everyone on the committee gets pulled away by real-life duties now and then. No, it's just the usual problem – we need more moderators." His gaze drifted back to the picture, his cocoa forgotten. "He's how old? Fourteen?"

"Thirteen. He's bright for his age."

"Definitely adolescent, though, and therefore above my AOA. I don't suppose you have any pictures of him when he was younger?"

Johnnie shook his head and stared down at the woolen coverlet he threw over the day bed during the daytime. Through the open window, he could hear the chatter of voices as people lined up for the late evening show. He said in a low voice, "I feel guilty about that sometimes: the fact that I won't be attracted to him in a few years. I feel like it's a betrayal – proof that I don't really love him."

"Concerned & Angry tried that argument on Conscientious Objector last week." Delius put the cocoa down again, untouched. "C.O. didn't even bother to remind her that he's attracted to men as well. Instead he asked her, with sweet innocence, whether, if she awoke one morning and discovered that her husband had returned to the age of seven, she would still be attracted to him. She fell right into the trap, saying indignantly, 'Of course not!' Whereupon C.O. cried with mock horror, 'What? Your love for your husband is age-dependent? Why, if the feelings you hold toward him are dependent upon the age he is, then you can't truly love him at all—' And so on and so forth, parroting back all the words she'd spoken." Delius placed the picture in Johnnie's hands and rose, saying, "Love is more than sex, White Rose. If it weren't, you'd have had that boy's clothes off weeks ago."

Picking up the cocoa and cups, Johnnie carried them over to the sink. "But sometimes I wish . . ."

"Wish what?" Delius's voice was sharp.

"Oh, I don't know. It's just that he means so much to me, and right now I think he likes me a lot, but in a few years he'll have forgotten all about me. And I think about Conscientious Objector and his friendship with his old lover, and I wish it could be like that between Milano and me."

"Teachers can sometimes inspire lifelong love in their pupils. I wouldn't aim for anything more if I were you."

Johnnie, reaching toward the tap with rag in hand, looked back at Delius. Gold Star was still standing next to the coffee table; he had the photograph in his hand again and was looking down at it. Then, as though in deliberate decision, he placed the picture on the coffee table and turned it face down.

"You know what I mean," said Johnnie. "It's even worse for you. Unless the laws change, you'll never have a friendship with a boy, whether sexual or nonsexual. How do you keep from exploding?"

Delius gave him a smile with an edge of mockery. "Cold showers are underrated."

"It's not that. You just said it yourself. Sex isn't what we want the most."

Delius continued to look down at the photograph, even though he could no longer see its face. He had a bandage over his scarred hand, a legacy of the weekend he and Johnnie had spent cleaning up his alley. "I suppose every boylover finds his own solution. Brick doesn't even think that there is any problem; he says that it's a mistake to pattern boylove relationships after marriages. He believes that there are biological reasons related to female sexuality why sexual unions between men and women should be permanent and monogamous, as he plans for his own marriage to be. But he says that it would be as silly for him to enter into a lifelong union with one boy as it would be for a teacher to spend all of his life with one pupil. He says that he derives satisfaction from teaching one pupil as much as he can, and then going on to the next child who needs him. He believes boylove is like that."

"But that option isn't available to you," said Johnnie. "And even if it were . . . You implied in one of your letters that you were looking for more."

"I don't know that my thoughts on this were fully formed when I knew Teddy," said Delius. "But now . . ." Delius gave one of his small, one-shouldered shrugs and came over to take the cleaned mugs from Johnnie's hand. "I thought rooming with someone might help. But even before Brick backed out, I'd already decided that wouldn't resolve matters. Brick's heart and mind are mainly focussed on his fiancée; if I'd roomed with another boylover, he'd mainly be thinking about boys. Heaven knows that boys are important to me as well, even now, but it would be frustrating living with someone who was always absorbed in his girlfriend or his young friends or whatever. It would be like we were trains crossing in two different directions."

"But there must be some sort of solution," said Johnnie as Delius finished drying the mugs and placed them in the cupboard. "For the gods' sake, there are millions of boylovers born every year. Over all these centuries, some of them must have found a way to keep from feeling utterly lonely."

"Well," said Delius, taking the final mug from him, "I thought last year of asking Pedo-Hag to marry me."

Johnnie dropped the pitcher in the sink. For a moment his ears rang from the crash, but the thick glass held firm. Johnnie scooped the pitcher up, saying weakly, "You wanted to marry her?"

The corner of Delius's mouth was twitching, but all he said was, "I thought it might work. She and I both like each other a lot, and she makes half-serious jokes now and then about marrying a boylover. I think she feels it's her duty to marry a bisexual boylover who would have a hard time finding a wife who understood him. She's comfortable around celibate boylovers; she wouldn't go into hysterics if I turned my head to look at a boy I was walking past. And I'd get the companionship I crave."

"But if you married her," Johnnie said hesitantly, "wouldn't you have to . . . ? I mean, could you . . . ?"

Delius gave a one-shouldered shrug. "I figured I could probably handle the bedroom bit, in a minimal fashion. I mean, you hear about gay men who somehow manage to have sex with their wives."

"But you didn't ask her?"

Delius shook his head as he reached up to place the pitcher on the highest shelf. "The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me like an unfair exchange. I mean, if she was attracted to me, it would be difficult, because I couldn't be attracted to her, even under the best of circumstances. Maybe I'd be able to give her a little pleasure, but I wouldn't be able to respond in the way that she was responding to me, and I know that would make a difference to someone like Pedo-Hag. So I'd end up doing all the taking and none of the giving."

"Does that matter to you?" Johnnie knew the answer, but he felt the need to keep the conversation going. He could hear the voices continuing in the street, and he knew that if Delius went home now, he would end up standing beside the window, looking down at the theater queue.

Delius shrugged again. "I'm a boylover, Johnnie. I've spent the past fifteen years training myself to put the other person's needs before my own. I can't break that training just because the person is an adult rather than a child."

"So what is the solution?" Johnnie asked as Delius sat down again on the day bed. "Maybe we should post this question at BoyChat. Other boylovers must have gone through this, and maybe they've found an answer."

Delius settled back against the cushions. "I've heard Conscientious Objector's solution to the problem. C.O. doesn't spend nearly as much time in bed with boys as he likes to imply on Crossroads. He told me once that if he weren't able to make love to men, he'd have gone insane long ago." Delius leaned forward, pulling the laptop toward him. "He's been urging the same solution on me. He says that if I'm going to be so Puritan as to refuse boys, at least I shouldn't be a complete fool and give up on men as well."

There was a long pause. Delius, frowning at whatever he saw on the screen, scooted forward and turned the laptop so that he could see better. Johnnie could only see one quarter of his face now.

"But," Johnnie said, "I thought—"

"Thought what?" Delius did not pause as he typed a message.

"I thought you were like me, only attracted to boys. If you're attracted to men as well, then I— Well, it would be okay—"

"What would be okay?" Delius, absorbed in his message, seemed irritated by the interruption.

"I just mean that— Well, if you wanted to— That is, it's the sort of thing one would do for a friend—"

He knew that he was fumbling badly. He was not surprised when Delius, finally turning away from the computer, gave him a mocking smile. "Johnnie," he said, "you're a treasure, really you are. But you're more than twenty years over my AOA."

Johnnie, his hand on the sink enamel that was warm under the May heat, felt his face turn hot. His expression must have matched his fiery cheeks, for Delius's smile disappeared and he said quietly, "No, truly, Johnnie, I'm greatly honored that you'd make such an offer to me, but even if it had been possible, I wouldn't have asked that sort of sacrifice from you."

"It wouldn't exactly have been a sacrifice," Johnnie said, a small wave of relief now following his embarrassment. "I mean, it wouldn't have disgusted me or anything. It's just that it wouldn't have meant much to me."

"Well, then." Delius dismissed the matter with a wave of the hand and turned back to the screen. "We've got another poster making death threats; I think it's Lynch Em, though I can't prove it. I've banned the IP address he's using today, but he has posted under thirty different nicks so far, with just as many IP addresses. We may need to make posting 'password only' again, though I don't know how we're going to convince Concerned & Angry to submit a password of her choosing to us. She still thinks we're a boylove board, and soldiers in the battle against child abuse don't cooperate with the enemy."

Johnnie felt uneasy, as though an important online thread had been unexpectedly snapped by a software glitch. But all that he said was, "Maybe you can get Pedo-Hag to talk to her. After all, she's a survivor—"

A clanging bell went off, so loud that Johnnie jumped in his place. Delius, glancing over his shoulder as he reached for the mouse, said, "Just my computer. Sorry."

"E-mail?" Johnnie guessed as he watched Delius click on an icon.

"Urgent e-mail. I put in software to alert me when— Oh, hell." Delius read for a moment, his eyes moving rapidly, then leapt up, saying, "May I use your phone?"

"Of course," said Johnnie. "What's happened?"

"Brick took to dinner a new participant at BoyChat who was supposedly a boylover, only he turned out to be a TV reporter." There was a pause as Delius punched into the phone his calling card number; then he added, "The guy secretly filmed Brick talking about Free Spirits, then broadcast the results on the six o'clock news. . . . Hi, Brick; it's Gold Star. Look, if it was only the local news, it's not a total disaster. The program will only have been shown in your local region, and ninety percent of the people who saw it wouldn't recognize you again if you knocked on their doors. If you're feeling nervous and are willing to brave customs again, you can drive down here. I think I know a boylover who could put you up." He glanced at Johnnie for confirmation, but even as Johnnie nodded, Delius's face changed. After a minute, he said, "Jesus, yes, you can't abandon the boy before his big recital. Do his parents know about the broadcast? . . . Well, listen, let me e-mail the folks at the real-life support group in . . ."

Johnnie's attention drifted away. On the counter next to him was a cookbook, open to the recipe he had prepared for himself and Delius that night. He remembered his mother teaching him how to cook when he was in high school – "so that your wife can have the night off now and then," his mother had said.

He closed the book and went over to Delius's backpack, which had been dumped on the floor upon Delius's arrival. As Johnnie scooped up the bag to place it on the kitchen table, something little slipped out of the exterior pocket of the bag and fell with a soft thump to the floor. Johnnie bent to pick it up.

It was a square, flat, cardboard box, small enough to fit into Johnnie's hand, with a clear cover. In the light from the theater marquee, Johnnie could see the glitter of the contents. "Twenty thousand gold stars," he murmured to himself.

"What did you say?" asked Delius, putting down the phone.

"Nothing," said Johnnie, slipping the package back into the bag. "I think I answered my own question; I just don't like the answer. Is Brick coming here?"

"No, I think the people in the support group will be able to take care of him. They have lots of experience in this sort of thing; boylovers in crisis are always contacting them for help. There was talk last year of starting a real-life support group in southern California, but what with the latest court decisions there . . ."

Outside, the last of the conversations died down. Johnnie went over to the window and glanced out. As Delius talked on, he caught a glimpse of the grey-haired couple walking through the doors, followed by a single old man with his hands thrust deep in his pockets, his head low, and his back bowed.

* * *

Wow, now I have a therapist!
Posted at BoyChat by True Boylover on Thursday, May 10, at 9:40 PM

Gosh, I don't know how I survived before I met you guys. Not only have you given me the courage to acquire a young friend, but now you've helped me find a therapist!

One of the boylovers here (he asked me not to mention to you his nick) used to live in the city near me, and he told me the name of the therapist he saw there. The therapist doesn't charge much and is really nice. He knows all about BoyChat, and though he warned me about the limitations of online support, he says that I could use all the support I can get right now. He says that my problems are so serious that he thinks I should attend meetings for sex offenders. Of course I'm glad to do anything he tells me. In the meantime, he has put me back on some sedatives my last therapist had prescribed for me.

I was a bit worried about whether he would tell the police about me, and he did explain that he is bound by the laws here in [deleted by moderator] on mandatory reporting of child abuse, but since I haven't abused any children, that's okay. He made me promise that I would always be honest with him, even if it means telling him if I abuse a child, but I told him I'm trying to be a true boylover, and true boylovers don't hurt kids!

I told him a bit about B. He thinks it's okay for me to keep seeing B, since all of our conversations take place on the front lawn of B's home. Actually, I can only mow the lawn so many times a month, so I've volunteered to help clean the backyard, but it's not much different from talking with B out front.

Got to go now; I have to wake up early for my job. It's a bit discouraging there, because the guys at work talk all the time about their girlfriends, and I have nothing to contribute, but I just think about B and think about how the other guys don't know what they're missing!

Love,
TB

Chapter Six

Keywords

Uniting parents and boylovers
Posted at Crossroads by Gold Star on Monday, May 21, at 9:15 PM
In reply to So you admit that you've abused children! posted by Concerned & Angry

I'm afraid that White Rose is otherwise occupied this evening. No doubt he'll want to respond to you tomorrow, but your post (which a BoyChat participant phoned me about) seemed important enough to deserve a response right away.

I believe that what White Rose was saying in his post was that he had exchanged posts with a boylover who had entered into a sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old in a jurisdiction where such relationships are legal, and that the boylover had done so with the parents' consent. I think that White Rose was saying that, by examining such relationships, we might have a better sense of what boylove would be like in world where man-boy sex was accepted, as opposed to only examining boylove sexual relationships that are illegal and take place without the parents' knowledge. I don't believe that White Rose was saying that he had entered into such a relationship himself or that he would necessarily advocate such a relationship for others here.

Personally, I think that such relationships are not a good idea for the same reason that I think that outing oneself to a non-ped is not a good idea: because the risks are too great. A diligent police officer who wants to arrest you can always find a law on the books to charge you with breaking, even if you have parental permission for the relationship. If it's not statutory rape, then it's abuse of authority; if it's not abuse of authority, then it's obscene communications (i.e., talking to one's beloved over the phone).

I knew a guy who lives in a country that has a law forbidding written boylove erotica. He was visited by the police, who found nothing unusual in his home except a survey questionnaire that had been e-mailed to him by a researcher who was doing a study of celibate boylovers. The boylover had answered honestly the question about his sexual fantasies, so he was convicted of possessing child pornography.

But I'd like to get back to the question of the relationship between parents and boylovers. In this era when so many of us are bemoaning the loss of the extended family – with its network of elder relatives that a child can turn to if he wants non-parental guidance – it seems to me that many people have overlooked the potential value of boylovers to play this role. I know that you feel uneasy about the idea of boys entering into sexual relationships with men. By now, I trust you understand that many of us here share your belief that such a relationship is inappropriate in today's society. But that should not prevent us from exploring other possibilities for how boylovers' mentoring talents can be put to use.

Suppose, for example, that the ped your son knew had not in fact abused him, and suppose also that your husband had abused your son. (Understand that I'm being purely theoretical here. I'm sure that your husband would never do anything like this.) Under those circumstances, who would your son turn to? It would be nice if he sought your help, but I'm afraid it's likely that your son would be reluctant to do so, because of your close relationship with your husband. Instead, I think it's most likely that he would go to his older friend for help.

Now, if you had been forbidding your son to have contact with any men in the neighborhood, for fear that he would be molested, this would place your son's older friend in a very awkward position. In order to seek help for your son, he would have to reveal that he had been meeting with your son secretly and thus lay himself open to possible false accusations that he himself was an abuser. On the other hand, if you knew that your son was friends with this ped, and you had allowed that friendship to continue (under whatever circumstances you felt appropriate), then the man could – with the boy's permission – immediately alert you to the fact that your son was being abused.

This is only one of several ways in which boylovers can play a role that complements, rather than infringes upon, the work that parents do. I know many boylovers who have excellent relationships with the parents of their young friends. Alas, in today's society they must hide their sexual orientation from the parents. Hopefully, the day will come when that is no longer necessary, just as it is no longer necessary, in many cases, for a gay man to hide his orientation before he takes up work in a place of employment that includes other men.

The era when boylovers can out themselves to the world is far away, I'm afraid, but it would be interesting to start exploring now what steps could be taken to improve communication between boylovers and parents. It would make sense for parents to tell boylovers, "Here are the limits that we, in our role as primary moral guide for our children, believe are suitable. Provided that you follow these limits, we would welcome your help in raising our children." As a first step to this new era, I would like to suggest that a forum could be established for an alliance of parents and boylovers who wish to work together, rather than in opposition to each other, in order to better boys' lives.

Boylove is a permanent sexual orientation, and it occurs in every era; parents can't simply wish away our existence. Instead, they should make use of our gifts.

Gold Star
Webmaster
Crossroads

You raped my son!
Posted at Crossroads by Concerned & Angry on Tuesday, May 22, at 5:02 PM
In response to Uniting parents and boylovers posted by Gold Star

Go ahead and ban me under your silly security rules (which you apply very selectively; I see that the post below by Conscientious Objector hasn't earned him so much as a slap on the wrist). You can try to hide from the truth by banning anyone here who doesn't agree with you, but the truth remains: people like you raped my son and continue to rape children every year.

Last night my son came home unexpectedly. He's supposed to be working on a big project at work right now, one that could earn him a raise and a higher title, but he had to come home to check himself into a clinic for a few days because he has been breaking apart under the weight of his flashbacks to the time when he was abused by one of you "boylovers."

"God, when will this go away?" he asked his father and me. He was shaking and sobbing as he said this. You will have to take my word for it that my son is not the sort of man who would normally shake and sob.

The sad truth is that I couldn't promise that his nightmare will ever go away. It's quite possible that, until the end of his life, he will continue to be tortured by the memories of what happened. His abuser was released from prison several years ago, but my son continues to suffer a lifelong sentence.

AND YOU WANT US TO PUT MORE CHILDREN INTO YOUR CARE? DO YOU THINK WE PARENTS ARE WITLESS?

You dumbbells just don't get it, do you? YOU . . . ARE . . . SICK. You don't put children into the hands of pedophiles, any more than you put drink into the hands of an alcoholic – especially not if the "drink" is a vulnerable child whose life could be destroyed.

> many of us here share your belief that such a relationship is inappropriate in today's society

Translation: "We're going to pretend that we're opposed to child sexual abuse because we don't like the idea of being locked up, but the moment you're relaxed and unwary, we're going to make sure that laws are passed so that we can molest your children."

> Boylove is a permanent sexual orientation

I'm well aware that, in most cases, pedophilia is an incurable disease (to translate your statement out of your usual political correctness). All the more reason why you should stay away from children. If I were a rapist, I wouldn't go hanging around in singles' bars, searching for women to "mentor." Yet listen to the jobs you people hold: teachers, sports coaches, youth center assistants, Scout leaders, schoolwork tutors . . . My God, it's like listening to a bunch of alcoholics earnestly explain how they need to take jobs in bars in order to learn how to drink responsibly.

IF YOU CARE ABOUT CHILDREN, STAY AWAY FROM THEM. We parents will be glad to give you any help you need in doing that.

CA stands for Concerned & Angry

P.S. Don't think that I didn't notice your attempt to shift the blame from my son's "friend" to the "abuse" my husband and I supposedly piled upon our son during his childhood. You're too late; Conscientious Objector has already given his spiel about parental neglect and how boylovers are the obvious solution to that.

Addressing parents' concerns
Posted at Crossroads by Pedo-Hag on Tuesday, May 22, at 6:23 PM
In response to You raped my son! posted by Concerned & Angry

First of all, Concerned & Angry, I'm the one who decided not to ban Conscientious Objector for the post he made below. I did so because the particular line I'm sure you're referring to – "I've recently completed a tour of the boy brothels of the world" – is one that he has used on at least four different child advocates, in a successful attempt to get a rise out of them. I've spoken privately with Conscientious Objector and made clear to him that he can no longer post jokes that could be misunderstood by someone not familiar with his sense of humor.

I'm very sorry to hear of your son's recent relapse. I'm sure that you have helped him to locate the best real-life support that is available in your area, but if he should need additional support, please tell him that he is welcome at my survivor board. (Non-incest survivors sometimes post there.) I've found that being able to talk with other survivors about my memories has done a great deal to ease the pain.

A couple of other participants at Crossroads – both boylovers – are also survivors of sexual abuse and may be able to recommend additional online resources.

Switching over to your post, Gold Star: Dear, if I had a child, and if you were to turn up at my doorstep and say, "This is Gold Star; I was wondering whether you needed a babysitter for your son," I'd throw the door wide open. After all this time we've spent talking together, I know you as a man who deeply cares about boys and about their good relationships with their parents, and who would never violate the moral standards I have established for my own household.

But picture this scenario: A strange man turns up at my door and says, "Hi! I'm a boylover who belongs to the Alliance for Boylovers and Parents. I'd like to babysit your son." My reaction, I'm afraid, would be to slam the door shut – not because I have anything against this man in particular, but simply because he is a stranger to me. I know nothing about him. For all I know, he could be a molester.

That's the problem with the word "boylover," you see. It tells you nothing about a person's character and values, any more than the word "heterosexual" does. You I trust, but you know that there are men on these boards who I wouldn't trust within a mile of my house. I'm sorry, but that's the reality of it.

Now, I agree with you that the only solution to this problem is greater openness in our society so that each boylover can be judged on his own merits, rather than being grouped in with a bunch of other people with whom he may have nothing in common. But when you start talking about an online alliance, my interest wanes. That's because, much as I value online groups (obviously I do, or I wouldn't be here), I think they have limited value in establishing trust.

I trust you, but I do so despite the fact that we've had no real-life contact rather than because of it. You and I have exchanged thousands of e-mails and posts; otherwise I wouldn't trust you as I do. And even so, I've seen that you have different layers. When I started reading your posts at Crossroads, I thought of you as sober and stern and somewhat autocratic, because that's how you come across in your posts. Then, when we started e-mailing each other, I learned to my great surprise that you are also lighthearted and witty. Heaven only knows what you are like in real life. I don't believe that your real-life persona includes you going around abusing children, but I can only say that because we've corresponded so much.

Most people simply can't invest that much time in getting to know another person online. The only real way in which they can say "I trust you" is by getting to know the person in real life. So, while an online Boylover-Parent Alliance is a great idea, just as Crossroads is, I think it can only be a temporary solution. In the long run, boylovers and parents will have to speak openly and honestly face-to-face.

"And how do I do that," you ask, "if the moment I out myself, someone loads up their gun?" I honestly don't know the answer to this question, and I wish I did. All I do know is that, under ordinary circumstances, lasting trust can only be established in real life. And sometimes not even then.

Pedo-Hag
Co-Webmaster
Crossroads

* * *

"Chastity is a gift," suggested Johnnie. "It's a special vocation that not all of us are suited for, so the churches can't require lifelong celibacy from us."

He had stolen this argument from Brick and expected Paul to say something about the perspective of the boy, but Paul merely nodded agreeably and said, "Certainly celibacy can be a gift, and it is moving to see someone with this gift living his life. It's like watching an artist at work. But one of the sad mysteries of life is that God occasionally requires those of us who are not gifted in certain activities to practice those activities. For example, a friend of mine lost use of his legs in a car accident several years ago. To live the life of a disabled man was not a change he was prepared for, nor did he have any special gift for it. Yet he had no choice but to take on this duty, just as a man with ageing parents may be required to care for them, even if it forces him to sacrifice work for which he is better suited." He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a piece of paper, and unfolded it. "I don't know why God requires this extra suffering from some of us. Perhaps it is his way to permit us the privilege of sharing more closely in Christ's suffering."

Johnnie was silent a minute, his gaze fixed on the steep hill they were climbing between the math building and the art building. Then he said, "Some of your arguments startle me. I keep expecting you to talk about how all BLs are mentally ill, or about how the power differences between men and boys mean that abuse always occurs in a BL sexual relationship. Instead, you just keep going on about how boys are too young to make a decision to enter into a lifelong union."

"I assume that you're already familiar with the secular arguments," Paul said, waving at a female student who was passing. "Not that I would scorn such arguments. I know a number of ex-gays who were badly scarred by sexual abuse when they were children, and I also know some ex-gays who are minor-attracted and who seem to me to be quite unstable mentally. But the problem with making generalizations is that, sooner or later, you run across an exception. If you've built a moral argument upon empirical grounds that founder, then your moral argument founders as well." Paul paused, glanced at the campus map he was holding in his hand, and started forward again.

"Some of the wiser heads in the ex-gay community have come to recognize that," he said. "The churches, you know, used to say, 'You mustn't have sex with another man because all homosexuals are mentally ill.' Or, 'You mustn't have sex with another man because your relationship will be abusive.' And then along came a slew of people like my gay friend who are quite obviously mentally healthy and are in loving, caring relationships with their partners. So of course these gays aren't at all impressed by the traditional secular arguments against homosexual behavior. Only moral arguments – arguments based on a deeper understanding of why God wills our sexuality to be the way it is – can reach them. . . . I'm sorry this path is so steep, by the way."

"That's okay," said Johnnie. He barely noticed the upgrade as he looked over at Paul, whose expression was tranquil in the late May sunshine. "I see what you're saying, but still, I nearly went into shock the other day when you said at CBF, 'I believe that some BL sexual relationships have most likely been non-abusive.'"

"Non-abusive but immoral," said Paul. "The trouble with our world is that it takes the view that psychological healthiness equals spiritual healthiness. I know a man who has had four wives. He's a very clear-thinking, steady person, a man that any psychologist would give a clean bill of health. His ex-wives give no sign of having been traumatized by his divorce of them. Still, I believe he's living an immoral life, and I think that, at a much deeper level than any psychological test can measure, he and his ex-wives have been damaged by the life he leads. It's the same with BLs. As far as I can tell, Johnnie, there's nothing abnormal about you aside from your sexual feelings, and I cannot say with absolute certainty that, if you had sex with your young friend M, he would end up like my abused ex-gay friends rather than happy and delighted like Conscientious Objector was. But the damage you'd do to M and yourself would be deeper. If you had sex with a—" He fell silent.

They passed the students without incident; the young men were absorbed in a discussion of an upcoming fraternity party for freshmen. Johnnie thought that he had managed to keep his gaze fixed upon the sidewalk they were travelling on, but as the young men's voices faded into the background, Paul said, in a briskly matter-of-fact manner, "Was that young one within your AOA?"

"He might have been," said Johnnie uneasily, "if he hadn't been a student. I'd guess that he's an adult, or the equivalent of one."

"That makes a difference to a BL?"

"Not to all BLs. I know some for whom age or stage of development is everything; if twelve-year-olds became adults by law tomorrow, it would make no difference to them. But for me . . . It's hard to explain, but my feelings are wrapped up with a desire to care for someone else. You don't take care of an adult the same way you do a child. On the other hand, if our society was changed so that we trained boys to take on adulthood at age ten, that would delight De—"

He stopped himself just in time, biting his lip so hard that he could taste the salt of his blood. Paul said, "Delight who?"

"Oh, no one. Just a boylover I know. You were saying about abuse." He tried to deflect the conversation back to Paul, who was watching him a little too intently.

"Yes, abuse." Paul turned his attention back to the map as they reached the crest of the hill. "Another problem is that the Christian Church doesn't have a particularly good record in this area – all those child marriages it encouraged during its early years, sometimes with a great age gap between the man and the woman, a difference in maturity that seems to have been positively celebrated. I was recently rereading St. John Chrysostom's twentieth homily on Ephesians, in which he offers advice to a husband on how to care for his youthful wife, and I was struck by the phrases used in it to describe the wife: 'a young and tender maiden,' 'a child,' 'take her and mold her well.' If you changed only a few words, the homily would sound like a post on the BL boards about the manner in which a BL should care for his young friend."

"The Virgin Mary was quite young when she married," Johnnie said, remembering another of Brick's stock arguments. "Probably in her early teens. And St. Joseph was quite old."

"If tradition can be trusted," Paul agreed. "Of course, that was in a different culture, but still, I don't think anyone in the Church today would recommend that a sixty-year-old man marry a fourteen-year-old girl. And that's what it comes down to, really. The Church is sadly divided on whether homosexuality is a sin, but no one argues about whether adult-child sex is a sin. Whatever mistakes the Church may have made in the past, she realizes now that early marriages – whether 'age-differentiated,' as Brick calls them, or otherwise – just aren't a good idea."

"Other religions disagree," said Johnnie. He was looking uneasily around to see whether anyone had been close enough to hear the dangerous words "adult-child sex."

"You mean the pagans. Well, Johnnie, if you read the ancient sources you'll find that even the pagans had arguments against adult-child sex. The passages in Plato's Laws about pederasty— What's wrong?"

"Do you think we could change the subject?" Johnnie said, feeling a desperate sense of panic rising within him, even though he knew that the faculty members following them down the hill were not close enough to be able to hear the conversation.

"Yes, of course," said Paul at once. "Let's talk about you instead; I seem to do all the talking in our encounters. That's my fatal itch for lecturing, I'm afraid. Tell me about yourself – what sort of work do you do, exactly?"

There was a long silence. Johnnie was still trying to think how to break it when Paul's face changed and he said quietly, "My apologies; that was inexcusably rude of me. I keep forgetting the proper etiquette toward someone like yourself. I ought not to, as many of the same rules apply in the ex-gay world."

"It's not that I don't want to tell you," said Johnnie, his voice sinking in misery. "It's just—"

Paul cut him off with a raised hand. "There is no need to make explanations. We've only just met each other; friendships, like marriages, take time to build. I wouldn't want to rush you."

He pointed to a building on the horizon, at the edge of the campus. "That's the place. As I recall, the campus bookshop has an excellent selection of self-help titles. You might find a volume there on sex addiction that could be of help to True Boylo—"

"Thanks," said Johnnie, his voice rising in desperation once more as a group of graduate students passed them. "I think I can find my own way now. I appreciate the help." And he darted off before Paul could say anything.

* * *

The sun was low in the sky, casting little more than shadows into the room. The room was bright, though, with antique lamps and a chandelier and candles flickering on the table.

"This is excellent," said Johnnie, helping himself to another mouthful of the chicken casserole. "I thought the ex-gay groups discouraged its male members from undertaking such feminine accomplishments as cooking."

Paul, coming round the table to pour a second glass of wine for Johnnie, smiled down at him. "Actually, I felt greater defensiveness about my cooking back in my days of flamboyant effeminacy," he said. "Now that I'm more secure in my masculinity, I can afford to stop keeping track of whether I'm showing my predominant masculine side or my subordinate feminine side." He paused to cork the wine before reseating himself.

Remembering the pile of soda cans, Johnnie thought to himself how odd it was that Paul's house reminded him of Delius's apartment. Perhaps it was the framed art on the dining room walls. That picture by Monet of a cathedral could also be found – in its unframed version – hanging above the kitchen sink at Delius's place. There was something familiar too about the simplicity of Paul's suburban dwelling. Like Delius, Paul had evidently thrown the greater part of his earnings into buying art and books, although his computer equipment was considerably less conspicuous than Delius's. The remainder of the furnishings had a Shaker simplicity: they were without flourish but showed a plain beauty.

In other respects, of course, Paul's house could not have been more unlike Delius's apartment. Partly this was due to the selection of artwork. Whereas Paul was fond of pictures of saints with serene expressions, Delius was fond of World War One paintings showing the anguish of combat. Whereas Paul had hung a Pre-Raphaelite painting of the boy Jesus standing in the temple at Jerusalem, Delius had hung a photograph of a Greek statue of the boy Eros.

But the difference went deeper than that. Quite simply, not a single object in Paul's house was out of place. Books lay in carefully ordered piles upon the coffee table instead of being strewn over the floor as Delius's were; coats and jackets were neatly hung from hooks rather than finding their home upon any object close to the apartment door; dirty dishes – judging from Paul's clearing of the first course – were immediately banished to the dishwasher instead of idling around the counter in a faint hope that someone would notice them.

In many ways, Johnnie thought, Paul's home was much more congenial to him than Delius's; it reminded him of the tiny Victorian house where he had grown up. This thought made him uneasy, and he laid it aside, along with the bowl that had previously contained a salad so artfully arranged that Johnnie found himself wishing he could photograph it.

"My ministry is having a meeting for newcomers on Thursday evening," Paul said, sipping on his wine. "You might be interested in it."

Johnnie attempted a smile. "That's the third time you've asked me to one of your meetings. Why do I have the feeling you're grooming me?"

"Not at all," said Paul, reaching for the pepper. He spent a moment grinding the pepper onto his casserole, then said, "I spoke to Jevon on the phone last night. He's coming home from college for the month of July, and he says that he'd like to meet you."

Johnnie was stabbed with a momentary feeling of unreasoned alarm at this news that Paul had been discussing him with others. Then he discovered he was laughing. When he was able to catch his breath again, he saw Paul raising his eyebrows quizzically.

"I'm sorry," Johnnie said. "Of course I'd like to get together with him; it will be wonderful meeting in real life with another pedophile. I was just envisioning, though, how the city paper would report on such a meeting. 'Local Pedophiles Form Child Sex Ring. Concerned Parents Demand Arrests. Dr. Jane Expert of the Superscientific Society to Study and Dissect Pedophiles urged parents not to panic. "Not all meetings by pedophiles are for the purpose of planning child molestations," she said in her well-renowned compassionate manner. "Some pedophiles simply meet for the purpose of exchanging child pornography . . ."'"

Paul gave a soft snort of laughter as he reached for his water glass. "The unknown can often look threatening to outsiders. As an example, I think that most people in the general public believe that ex-gay ministries are all mind-control operations, akin to those religious cults that brainwash their members. In actual fact, my ministry has a stringent entrance procedure to ensure that new members are not being forced to attend meetings against their will."

There was a long silence. Faintly, through the French windows, Johnnie heard the sound of the family next door chatting and laughing as they held a backyard barbecue. Johnnie said, "Look, I wasn't saying that I have anything against the ex-gay group you attend. I'm just busy tutoring M on Thursday, that's all."

"What days are convenient for you, then? My ministry leader will sometimes hold extra sessions if an enquirer can't make it to the regular meetings."

Johnnie felt the heat surge through his face. He slammed down the silver fork onto the table, saying, "You are trying to groom me."

Paul seemed undisturbed by the vibration of Johnnie's crash; he simply put his hand forward to assure that his glass would not tip over. "Let's say that I am," he replied mildly. "If Conscientious Objector tried to wear you down into visiting a message board he'd started to discuss what constitutional protection American boylovers have if they choose to break age-of-consent laws, would you angrily accuse him of trying to convert you to his beliefs? Or would you say, 'Sure, I'll take a look at it,' and then glance at it, determine whether it was the sort of place where you wanted to post regularly, and pass on to other matters?"

Johnnie took up his fork and picked at the casserole noodles for a while. He finally said, "I'm sorry. I guess you unintentionally touched a raw spot for me. The thought of attending an ex-gay meeting brings back all those horrible memories of my years in college, of trying to change myself so that I wasn't attracted to twelve-year-olds, and of how I almost went crazy trying to accomplish the impossible."

"Perhaps you went about it the wrong way," Paul suggested. "Trying to achieve psychological or spiritual growth on your own, without any assistance from others, can be a difficult task. But let's leave aside the issue of change. Some ex-gay ministries concentrate on encouraging celibacy, and that's the approach taken by many of the secular sexual recovery groups as well. Have you ever attended such a group?"

Johnnie said slowly, "I can't believe it. You are trying to seduce me."

Paul smiled as he rested his chin on his fist. The candlelight flickered on the friendship ring given to him by his girlfriend. "Let's just say that I'm trying to fill in the missing gaps in your life story. You told me once that you thought that reporting yourself to the police or committing suicide or raping a boy were your only options. Then you discovered the boylove boards. Along the way, did you try any other support groups for minor-attracted adults?"

Johnnie, realizing that he was making a mess of his casserole that was worthy of Delius, forced himself to swallow a bite before saying, "I visited one of the recovering offender forums once. I thought it would be a good place to learn proper behavior toward my young friends."

"And?"

Johnnie shrugged, returning to pushing his food around his plate. "I don't know how to describe it. What would you do if you came to a group that you thought was for the purpose of giving marriage counselling, and someone told you, 'Welcome! Just sit right down here, next to the rest of us wife batterers'?"

"I'd sit down," Paul replied promptly. "Learning about marriages that have failed is a splendid way to keep from failing in one's own marriage. Besides, there's always the chance that I might learn something that would keep me from striking my wife in the future." He took a long look at Johnnie's face and added, "I know what you mean, of course. I sometimes feel left out of conversations at my ministry about homosexual behavior of the past, since I've never engaged in homosexual behavior. Still, I think you'd find that sexual recovery groups have certain benefits to offer that the boylove boards don't. Greater unity of moral values, for example."

Johnnie narrowed his eyes to look past the candles between himself and Paul. "Paul, what are you trying to say?"

Paul dabbed his mouth with his napkin, left the cloth neatly folded beside his plate, and stood up, beginning to gather the empty dishes together. "More than I should, perhaps. So let me just say I worry that you haven't fully explored all of your options. Other boylovers such as At Peace have looked at the alternatives, you know. You shouldn't feel that learning what various paths are available to minor-attracted adults would threaten your status as a boylover. If boylove is a creed worthy of being followed, it can stand up to such a test."

"I suppose so," said Johnnie, handing Paul his plate. "I should think of it in the same way you've come to think of those years in the gay community – as an opportunity for growth, even if it's unpleasant. I guess I just can't imagine myself anywhere but the boylove boards, though. From the moment I got there, it felt like home, and the longer I'm there, the more normal it feels."

"That," said Paul, placing the last of the plates at the top of a neatly ordered stack, "is exactly what worries me."

Johnnie tried to speak then, but Paul was already saying, "I'm being a poor host. Johnnie, I mean this sincerely: if I'm putting pressure on you, then I apologize for my misbehavior. I'm like a health food nut who has found a wonderful new diet that has transformed his life. Naturally, I want all my friends to go organic as well. But if you feel that I'm force-feeding you, by all means tell me to shut up. That was never my intention."

"No, you're right; it would be interesting," replied Johnnie. "Sort of in the spirit of Crossroads – getting to know how other people view matters. It will have to wait till the summer, though. I'm too busy right now with Milano."

"Milano?" Paul, who had been looking down at the gravy tray as he inspected its contents, suddenly looked up, his eyes alert.

The sound of the plates shifting in Paul's hands could be clearly heard for a moment. Then Johnnie said, "Yes, that's M's real name."

"Ah." Paul seemed to lose interest. He took the dishes over to a sideboard and piled them there before returning to collect the glasses.

Outside, the children in the next yard were comparing video games. Johnnie could see them clearly, for Paul had not bothered to close the curtain or even to arrange the seating so that Johnnie's back was to the French windows. Johnnie waited until Paul had scooped up the glasses; then he took a deep breath and said, "My real name's John Steadman. Thanks for the dinner; I'd like to return the favor some time."

Paul smiled and said nothing. As he carried the wine glasses into the kitchen, Johnnie reflected that, if Paul had been grooming him tonight, then he had succeeded very well in his task.

* * *

He loves me!
Posted at BoyChat by True Boylover on Tuesday, May 22, at 7:24 PM

Guess what, guys! I followed Conscientious Objector's advice to tell B that I was in love with him, and B SAYS THAT HE'S IN LOVE WITH ME TOO. He said he was afraid to tell me before, because he was scared I'd go away.

It was sort of a short conversation, because we were worried that B's mother would come into the backyard at any moment, but we exchanged tokens of our love. (That was B's idea. He's very romantic.) B gave me a lock of his hair, and I gave B the BL logo pin that [deleted by moderator] mailed me.

I told B that I thought his parents might get concerned if I visited him all the time, but I've promised to send him a letter every day by hiding it in a hollow of a tree near his school. That was B's idea too. He read a story once about lovers meeting by moonlight.

I haven't decided yet whether to tell Jeff (my therapist) about B and me pledging our love to each other. You see, B and I exchanged a kiss – only one, and it was very chaste. But I'm afraid that Jeff will report me to the police because of that kiss. I told him I'd tell him if I abused a child, but I don't think that kiss abused B! It was his idea.

(Brick, I hope I didn't break any rules in the previous paragraph. If I have, just let me know.)

B's birthday is coming up. Do any of you guys have suggestions for what a boylover can give to his young friend? It has to be something that won't make his parents suspicious.

Love,
TB

Chapter Seven

Broken Connection

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)

Chapter Eight

Preview Mode

I *knew* you were a Puritan
Posted at Crossroads by Conscientious Objector on Wednesday, June 13, at 4:12 AM
In reply to If they don't offend, it's okay posted by Concerned & Angry

Thank you, ma'am, for revealing your true colors at last. For a while there I thought you were going to continue your masquerade as a person who simply hates all people of the boylove orientation. Now the truth emerges.

No doubt you are expecting all of us to applaud you for saying that you don't have any objection to a pedophile who keeps his pants zippered and lives a chaste life. Probably some of the others here will kiss your hand in gratitude; I ain't going to be one of them, ma'am. A bigot I can respect – she's at least consistent. Someone who says that it's all right to be a boylover but not to have sex with a boy is inconsistent as hell.

Let me explain to you (as I once again brush up your appalling lack of knowledge of the history of sexuality) that we've heard this all before. Once upon a time gays were told that God loved them even though they were born with the despicable affliction of homosexual desires. All they needed to do to be kept from going to everlasting hell was not go to bed with anyone.

Some churches still preach this nonsense. (Brick has rightly rapped me over the knuckles for saying that all churches do. I now concede that some Christians are pro-gay, though how they reconcile a positive sexual creed with a flesh-hating religion is beyond my understanding.) Some churches, and some very foolish secular people, are continuing to try to make a distinction between a person's orientation and his act of lovemaking.

It just can't be done. That sort of attempt to divide the heart and mind from the body is Puritanism. It's based on loathing of the body and an unwillingness to admit the joys of carnal knowledge.

If you say that it's okay to be a boylover, you can't say that it's wrong to love a boy sexually. Quite honestly, I find some of the statements along these lines by my fellow boylovers to be highly embarrassing. (Yes, I particularly have in mind a certain Christian Webmaster, but I won't go on again about his penchant for posting prim messages about the evils of masturbation.) It's like listening to slaves talk about how happy they are to serve their masters.

Conscientious Objector, because he won't put on his Uncle Tom hat and smile, smile, smile

You keep talking about yourself!
Posted at Crossroads by Concerned & Angry on Wednesday, June 13, at 4:49 PM
In reply to I *knew* you were a Puritan posted by Conscientious Objector

Me, me, me – that's all you pedophiles talk about. Who cares what joys you get from carnal knowledge (translation: molestation) of a boy. If you'd asked Jack the Ripper, no doubt he too would have given that spiel about not wanting to divide heart and mind from body.

What matters are the children, and you're ripping their hearts apart. How you ever got the idea that boylove has something to do with love is a mystery to me.

And I was not saying that it was all right to be a boylover, for God's sake. I was saying that if a pedophile seeks sexual recovery before he hurts a child, then he deserves a helping hand. "Boylovers" haven't admitted that they need serious psychiatric help, as you've just demonstrated.

I don't know why I spend so much time on this board; I have better things to do. Do you know what I was doing till midnight yesterday? Counselling a boy who was beaten daily by his father, then molested each night. The poor boy was so screwed up by what his father told him that he'd gotten it into his head that the molestation was his "reward" for being good. Do you know where that boy will be in ten years' time? Having daily counselling sessions with a therapist, trying to figure out how to form normal relations with women. (Or men. I keep telling you, I have nothing against any consensual sexual activity between adults.)

I know this because that's what my son's been doing recently; he's been trying to break past the terrible memories of his molestation so that he can have a good relationship with his girlfriend. He can't even find the strength to tell her "I love you," because he associates that phrase with his molestation! He's trapped in a world where "I love you" means "I'm about to molest you," where "I want to take care of you" means "I want to force my penis into you," where "I'll do anything for you" means "I'm going to do things that will destroy your life."

God, I can't write any more. If only you could see my son, you'd understand.

CA stands for Concerned & Angry & Weeping

CA talks about "me, me, me"
Posted at Crossroads by Conscientious Objector on Thursday, June 14, at 5:30 AM
In reply to You keep talking about yourself! posted by Concerned & Angry

O god of my fathers, give me patience to deal with morons like you. Once again you go on about your son as though he were the only boy in the world. Your son didn't like having sex with a man, so we should ban boylove. Jack the Ripper's victims didn't like being raped, so we should ban heterosexuality.

Try to get this through your head: Some boys like having sex with men.

Give me a break, ma'am. Take your sob stories to the little Christian tea parties you no doubt hold for like-minded fools.

Conscientious Objector, wondering why he bothers

YOU BASTARD!!!!! (nt)
Posted at Crossroads by Concerned & Angry on Thursday, June 14, at 4:25 PM
In reply to CA talks about "me, me, me" posted by Conscientious Objector

If I may intervene
Posted at Crossroads by Pedo-Hag on Thursday, June 14, at 4:35 PM
In reply to YOU BASTARD!!!!! (nt) posted by Concerned & Angry

Concerned & Angry, I'm grateful to you for taking the time to post here while your son continues to struggle with his recovery. If you feel like taking a break to deal with difficult emotional issues, we'll all understand. But I hope that, when you feel calmer, you'll continue to provide us with the insight that you've received in working with survivors.

Conscientious Objector, I don't think you can accuse me of seeing this issue in black-and-white terms. I've said many times before that I don't believe that every young person under eighteen who has sex with someone eighteen or older is harmed by the experience. My mother married my father when she was 16 and he was 20, and she wasn't harmed by having sex at that age. (My father was, because he wasn't mature enough to take on the duties of fatherhood, but that's another story.)

So yes, I believe that some boys out there like having sex with men, and I think that some of those boys benefit from the experience. (Not all of them; enjoyment and well-being aren't always identical.) I suspect that the number of such boys is quite small, but I know that this is just intuition on my part, based on the various problems I see that could arise in man-boy sex.

What I can prove, from the very research that you respect, is that boylovers can't always tell when a boy is being abused. That study of the Dutch loved boys you so often cite contains a section in which the researcher shows that the behavior which boylovers interpret as sexual come-ons by boys they meet quite often turns out to be nonsexual behavior from the boys' point of view. If boylovers can be wrong about something so basic as this, then it's easy to understand how they could miss the signs that the boy they love is unhappy at having sex with them.

My father had no idea that I was miserable about having sex with him. He thought that the signs of physical pain I was showing were just due to occasional clumsiness on his part, and he thought that the emotional stress I was showing was simply the ordinary sort of moping that people in love engage in. I'm not saying that this type of misunderstanding arises only in boylove and girl-love; I've seen adult couples miss signals that their partner was sending. But I think that it's more likely to happen when men and boys get together, because adults and children think in essentially different ways. I remember this quite clearly from my own childhood: I kept wondering how adults could be the same species when they thought so differently.

Obviously there's no way to get around the fact that someone has to bring up children. We can't get rid of parenthood. But sex can be postponed to an age when it's less likely that tragedies will arise such as arose in the case of Concerned & Angry's son. I'll bet you anything that if CA's son's older friend had asked him to have sex when he was nineteen rather than nine, then CA's son would have had no difficulty articulating whether this was really what he wanted to do.

By the way, Conscientious Objector, I owe you a debt that you'll no doubt have mixed feelings to hear about. When I first arrived on this board, as you know, I was furious with my father for all of the wounds he inflicted on me when I was a teenager. I hadn't spoken to him in years, even since he got out of prison. But the longer I was here, the more I realized how things must have looked from his perspective – how he honestly hadn't realized that he was abusing me. So I went to visit him a few months ago, and I showed him one of the posts you'd written about that boy you were seeing. I asked my father, "Is this how it was for you?"

And he broke down in tears, saying, "Yes, that was it. I thought you were in love with me."

So now, thanks to you and the others on this board, I'm at peace with my father again. I realize now how devastating it must have been for him to think that he was giving pleasure to the daughter he loved, only to learn how badly he'd hurt me. I hope that you and some others here will never have to undergo that experience with the boys you love.

Pedo-Hag
Co-Webmaster
Crossroads

* * *

"It's not just me," said Milano. "Anyone at my school who's different gets picked on. The foreign exchange kids, the kids who like poetry, kids from the poor side of the city . . . Last semester, a seventh-grader who's gay got his arm broken."

"It was like that at my school too," Johnnie agreed. He was seated in the desk chair, with his legs wrapped around the back, while Milano had taken over the bed that was strewn with textbooks and spiral notebooks. Milano was clutching a rollerball pen, as though making a record of his words as he spoke.

"Did you get picked on in school?" Milano asked.

"Well, middle school was hard for me at first, because I was a bit of a nerd. I liked schoolwork, you see, especially math. But in seventh grade I acquired a girlfriend, and that helped my standing with the other boys."

Milano looked crestfallen. Too late, Johnnie realized that recommending dating as a method of social advancement was probably not the best advice. He said quickly, "Not that she and I got along terribly well; we broke up after a few months. If I could have done it over again, I would have waited till college to date. Younger girls are notoriously fickle, going for the most musclebound guy or whatever. The people you meet in college are more mature. They have a better sense of what they want."

"Did you date in college?" Milano seemed to be making a great study of his pen, taking the cap on and off.

"Well, no, I didn't exactly date." Johnnie paused a moment to frame his answer in a truthful manner. "I wasn't romantically interested in anyone at that time. I had a close male friend, though, with whom I spent a lot of time, and that was just as good as dating would have been."

"Oh." Milano raised his eyes from the pen. Johnnie was suddenly seized with fear that he would be asked to describe his "male friend." He gestured toward the papers, saying, "The work you did today is great; I think you'll do excellently on the finals. Are you sure you want to keep up this studying once school lets out? I should think you'd want to get away from schoolwork during summer vacation."

"No, the math we do is fun. I like doing it with you."

Johnnie, reaching toward a paper at random, picked it up and made a show of reading it as Milano continued, "You know, I asked Mr. Thompson – he's my social studies teacher – about Plato, and he read me a bit from a story Plato wrote about friendship. It was called the Lacey— The Lucy—"

"The Lysias," Johnnie supplied, glancing up from the paper. He wondered which passage Mr. Thompson had read to Milano. Presumably not the part where the men in the gymnasium ogled the beautiful boys. "Yes, I read that dialogue in my college philosophy class. I liked how Plato portrayed the friendship between the two boys in the tale."

"Did you?" This seemed to be the right subject; Milano abandoned the pencil and leaned forward, resting his arm on his soccer ball beside him.

"Yes," said Johnnie, seeing his way clear now. "I have a friend who says that people in the modern world spend too much time thinking about dating – you know, asking the girl to a dance, and so on. He says that, in ancient times, people valued friendships just as much as they value dating now. A friendship between two boys would be just as important to them as going out to the school prom with a girl."

Milano seemed completely absorbed now. Johnnie found himself wondering which boy at school Milano wanted to be friends with, and he had to thrust away a momentary touch of jealousy. He continued, warming to his theme, "The Greeks considered feelings of friendship to be a type of love. They had a special word for it—" He caught himself in time, saying, "Well, I don't remember offhand what the word was. But the idea was that, if you weren't dating a girl, your life could still be really wonderful, provided that you had a special friend. . . . One who cared about you as you really were, not as everyone else thought you should be," he added. Then he waited to see whether Milano would say anything that would reveal whether the other boy was showing signs of being the special friend.

Milano seemed to grow suddenly shy, though, for he abandoned the soccer ball, lay down full length on his stomach, and began to finger through the papers. After a while, he said, "Yes, I thought that too. About friendship being a type of love, I mean."

"Oh?" Despite the importance of the coming announcement, Johnnie's gaze drifted over toward the computer, which was displaying a screen saver that looked like shimmering golden rain. He must tell Delius about that, he decided; he knew that Delius had been experimenting recently with making animated wallpapers for Free Spirits.

From the bed, Milano said in a low voice, without turning his head, "I love you, you know."

Johnnie felt the words shock through him as though his body had just turned to fire. For a moment he was silent, both because he could not breathe and because he was struggling to find the right words to say. Finally he said gravely, "I am honored."

Apparently it was the right response; Milano turned his head, relief written upon his face. "Do you love me?" he asked eagerly.

"Yes, of course." Johnnie tried to respond in the brisk, uncle-ish tones he had used with the twins. Apparently he succeeded too well, for Milano's face fell, and he turned back quickly to look at the papers.

Still struggling to make his lungs work, Johnnie gentled his voice and said, "I mean it. Of course I love you." And then, as Milano turned his face, hope returning to his expression, Johnnie added, "We've become friends, and that's nice, isn't it? Just like the boys in the Lysias. . . . Is that proof the one you did this afternoon? It's really good; I think I should show it to your mom. — No, you stay here," he added as Milano handed him the paper and prepared to rise. "You can get started on those problems in the last section. I'll bet your teacher will spring one of those on you as a surprise, when you take your test."

He found Sandra where she often was, in her bedroom where the family television was kept. She was absorbed in an afternoon soap opera, her eyes riveted to the screen as she pulled a blouse off the hanger. Johnnie, feeling as though every sensation he had felt in the past few minutes must be written upon his face, said rapidly, "I just wanted to show you this construction Milano did of a dodecahedron. He's really progressing well; I think I might be able to take him up to non-Euclidean geometry this summer—"

He stopped, startled out of his speech by the expression on Sandra's face. For a moment, he wondered whether she had overheard the conversation between Milano and him and somehow guessed the subtext taking place on his side. Then he realized that, above the waist, Sandra was wearing only a sports bra.

Before he could back out of the room, Sandra seemed to recover. She slipped on the blouse as Johnnie said, "I'm sorry. I should have knocked."

"It's my fault for leaving the door ajar," she said, her voice muffled by the cloth as she pulled it over her head. "I'm glad Milano's doing so well; it's kind of you to spend so much time with him. You like kids, don't you?"

"Yes," he replied in the greatest understatement of his life.

"I think Dave has a couple of daughters from his previous marriage. Do you know Dave? In customer service?"

"Yes, of course." He could not actually remember Dave at all, but there seemed no easy way to cut short this embarrassing interview.

"I heard that his relationship broke up recently."

"That's too bad," said Johnnie.

"Yeah, he was really cut up over it. He and his boyfriend had been together for five years, and they'd bought a house together." She smoothed down the cloth of her blouse, her ringless hands pale without their usual nail polish.

Sensing the reason behind this conversation, Johnnie found all his nervousness disappearing. He said gravely, "It must be hard to be with someone for a long time, then to be single again."

"It can be a bit lonely, yeah. There's Milano and his sisters, of course, but still . . ."

All of this touched too close to home for Johnnie. He found himself saying, "Are you still in love with Kim? Or could you start dating again?"

Sandra tossed her head in a shrug. "Yeah, well, you know how it is. All the good guys in the city are taken, or they aren't free for one reason or another. It's a tough world."

Johnnie did not reply at first. He was thinking of Gold Star and Pedo-Hag, and he was also thinking that, if he had been another boylover, he might have considered dating Sandra in order to spend more time with Milano. It would do her no harm in the short run. In the long run, though . . .

"Yes," he agreed. "It's a tough world."

* * *

The old man was where he always was, perched on the curbside, guarding his baskets of flowers. He caught Johnnie's eye and said, "Bouquet for your wife, sir?"

"I'm not married, thanks." Johnnie walked past him, but the old man was well versed in the ways of the city.

"Mistress?" he suggested. "Domestic companion? Life partner?"

"Thanks, no," said Johnnie, and left the old man trying to persuade a likely customer to buy a bouquet for his husband.

At the foot of the apartment building steps, Johnnie hesitated. It was only seven p.m.; Delius would not be home from class yet. But something tugged Johnnie away from the empty apartment awaiting him above, and he continued down the street to the shabby alleyway habitation.

The door was unlocked. Johnnie found Delius in his black room, sitting in front of his laptop, with his elbows on the table and his hands over his eyes. He didn't move as Johnnie stepped forward.

"What is it?" asked Johnnie, his voice rising in alarm. "Did the hackers crash the boards again?"

Delius thrust himself away from the desk and waved Johnnie into the seat. "See for yourself," he said.

Johnnie sat down, his gaze already moving over the post on the screen. After a moment, he said, "Oh, gods." Then a while later: "Oh, God."

* * *

Important news about a tragedy
Posted at BoyChat by A Regular on Thursday, June 14, at 6:40 PM

I'm a regular participant at this board, but I'm not posting this under my nick because the article below appeared in my local paper. It was published this afternoon; I've deleted some of the personal info.

~~~

Pedophile's "Love" Leads to Death of Boy
By Graham Brown
Mercury News Staff

RIVERSIDE – A pedophile convinced a ten-year-old boy to kill himself yesterday after police learned of the man's "love affair" with the boy.

The unconscious body of Ben Walters, a pupil at Greenwoods Elementary School, was discovered in a cabin next to Rushing River after a police investigation revealed that the boy had been spending time with a man who sent him what Riverside Police Chief Arnold Nicholson described as "very sick letters about their 'love affair.'"

Ben, who was the son of Kenneth and Joan Walters of Main Street, was rushed to the hospital but never regained consciousness. His death is thought to have been caused by the ingestion of a bottle of tranquilizers.

Law enforcement authorities first learned of the boy's plight when a concerned citizen called the state police with information on a possible molestation of Ben by Daniel V—, 19, who moved to Riverside last year. A search of Ben's home uncovered letters sent from V— to Ben. Ben's parents say that they had known of the boy's friendship with V— but had not suspected that their son was in trouble.

"His parents are completely devastated," a family representative told the Mercury News. "They knew about the dangers of pedophiles, of course, but this man seemed really ordinary."

A five-hour search of Riverside and surrounding countryside eventually resulted in the discovery of Ben's body in a disused cabin that lies on unclaimed property. Police say that they have evidence that V— used to meet secretly in this cabin with the boy.

V— was discovered lying unconscious near the boy, holding a note whose contents police refused to disclose. A witness to the scene, though, described the letter as being written jointly by V— and Ben, and said that it was "a double suicide note, Romeo and Juliet style."

V— was also taken to the hospital and is expected to recover. Nicholson says that he will be charged with first-degree murder and with possession of child pornography. It has not yet been decided whether to place an additional charge of child molestation.

Darren Franklin of the FBI's Sex Crimes Unit, who was consulted by local police on this case, warns that it is common for pedophiles to appear quite normal and to use pleasant methods to groom and lure children.

"It's a mistake to think of pedophiles as all being trench-coated men who grab kids and force them into alleyways," said Franklin. "The scariest thing about pedophiles is that they've convinced themselves that they actually love the children they molest."

Franklin especially warned against the new dangers posed by the Internet, where pedophiles often congregate.

Nicholson echoed Franklin's words, pointing out that evidence recovered from V—'s computer showed that he took part in an Internet message board under the nickname of "True Boylover." The message board, BoyChat, is described by Nicholson as a place where pedophiles meet to exchange tips on how to rape children.

Chapter Nine

Fatal Error

God, god, god. Does anyone know more? (nt)
Posted at BoyChat by Conscientious Objector on Friday, June 15, at 3:05 AM
In reply to Important news about a tragedy posted by A Regular

* * *

"It's not BoyChat's fault this happened!" cried Johnnie.

So close had he reached to his limits that he did not even bother to lower his voice, though it was a Monday evening, and he and Paul were sitting together in Paul's office. Paul, folding his hands upon the desk, said nothing.

"People go off their heads and do nutty things all the time," Johnnie persisted. "When I was little, the doctor in our town went bonkers and stabbed a patient. That doesn't mean we should shut down all the hospitals in the country."

"No," said Paul, turning to count the hymn books on the desk, "but if it appeared that the way a hospital was run was making it more likely that doctors would kill people, I would be reluctant to check myself in to such an establishment."

"That's crazy," said Johnnie, clenching his fists. "Boylovers are opposed to violence against children; it says so on the Free Spirits home page. If you were to post a survey at BoyChat, asking whether any participants believed that a boylover should encourage his young friend to commit suicide, not a single person there would say yes."

Paul looked up from the hymn books then, his spectacles shining from the lamplight. For a long moment he gazed at Johnnie. Then he opened one of the file drawers of his desk, ruffled through the folders there, and pulled out a sheaf of papers from one of them. Johnnie took the papers into his hands and looked at the title: "The Priest and the Acolyte."

"Did you ever finish reading that?" Paul asked.

Johnnie continued to stare down at the Internet print-out. "No."

"I think you'd best do so now."

Paul was in the chapel when Johnnie found him, placing hymn books in the pews. The chapel was empty and locked for the night. All of the lights had been shut off except for the emergency exit signs; the only other light came from the street lamps outside the windows. Johnnie leaned heavily against the post of the door connecting the chapel with the administrative wing. He slumped as though he had been running.

"Are you telling me," he said, his voice echoing in the stillness, "that True Boylover and Ben got the idea of killing themselves because I posted TB that story?"

"Not necessarily," said Paul, looking up as he picked a stray service leaflet off of a pew. "The tale of star-crossed lovers who kill themselves rather than allow themselves to be separated is part of our culture. True Boylover may have envisioned love that way long before he came onto the boylove boards. What he got from that" – Paul pointed to the story in Johnnie's hand – "and from hundreds of posts at BoyChat is the idea that children are as capable as adults of making life-and-death decisions."

"That's crazy," said Johnnie, with less force than he had used before. "I don't believe that. Gold Star of Crossroads doesn't believe that either. He thinks that the role of the boylover is to guide the boy with the man's greater maturity."

"Yet Gold Star believes that children in elementary school should have the legal right to choose to have sex." Paul lowered himself into a pew and gestured to the seat beside him. Johnnie shook his head.

"Paul," he said tightly, "we've been through all this before. I know your views on the sex issue, you know mine. What are you saying that is new?"

"That I think you should leave the boylove boards."

The chapel was very silent. All that Johnnie could hear was the soft whisper of a binding brushing against wood as Paul adjusted the Bible in the pew before him. Then Johnnie said bitterly, "So you think I shouldn't eat at table with the sinners any more."

Paul sighed heavily. "Johnnie, it's not a matter of making lepers of the boylovers. I wish that every person in the world who is concerned about child sexual abuse would come to the boylove boards and talk with the boylovers there, even if only for a short time. I think that would make all the difference in the world to the lives of the boylovers and of the boys with whom they interact. But there's a difference between encouraging righteous men and women to sit at table with the tax collectors and encouraging the same action by someone who is strongly tempted toward financial impropriety."

He gestured again toward the seat beside him, and this time, after a moment of hesitation, Johnnie walked slowly forward.

The chapel was decorated in the New England Puritan tradition, with a minimum of flourish and no art. Now that the seventies renovation had been cleared away, the one object in the chapel that caught the eye was a massive, bare cross at the far end of the chapel, looming over the small communion table in front of it. The cross was dark now, hidden in the shadows; it almost seemed to be waiting in the shadows, surveying silently the building and its contents.

"You praised At Peace last week for running the Christian Boylove Forum," Johnnie said as he lowered himself onto the bare wood of the pew.

Paul nodded. "At Peace reminds me of an inner city teacher who, having successfully resisted all the temptations of slum life, decides to remain at his drug-infested school and give what help he may. I wish there were thousands of minor-attracted adults like At Peace. I have no worries that At Peace will offend, any more than I am worried that Jevon will offend – but that is because, in both cases, their minds and hearts are in union with each other. Your case is very different. Your mind and your heart are at war with each other."

"I don't understand," said Johnnie, his throat tight. His feet were resting on the hard kneeler, and the uncompromisingly straight pew was digging into his back. He had not attended church for many years, one of his few open defiances of his parents' upbringing, despite the fact that nothing in his interfaith theology would have made such worship impossible. For him, church was associated with memories of long sermons about the fate reserved for those who went against God's will, and memories of his growing understanding as a teenager that he might be among those who perished in the eternal flames rather than be ushered into golden Jerusalem. Even Gospel passages about God's favor toward repentant sinners had not been able to erase from him the ingrained feeling that churches were one more place where someone like him was not welcome.

He found himself wondering whether his feeling of coming home at BoyChat was due less to its inherent worth than to the fact that every other home was closed to him, except on condition that he hide what he was.

Paul had been silent a while, staring at the dark cross. Now he said quietly, "This is difficult for me to say, Johnnie; I've been trying for a long time not to tell you what was plain to my eyes about the boylove boards. I thought it was better that you should come to see it for yourself. But now that this has happened . . . You told me a while back that you had made a firm commitment to lifelong celibacy."

"Unless society changes so that boylove is integrated into the social system again," replied Johnnie. "But I can't see that happening within my lifetime; societies just don't change that rapidly. So I guess my situation is the same as At Peace's."

"Not quite," said Paul, still quiet. "You say that you wish to remain celibate – do you have any idea at all how difficult it will be for you to keep that commitment? Up till now, you have had the good fortune not to have been placed in a position of strong sexual temptation, but that won't last forever. When the time of testing comes, you'll need armor with which to protect yourself against the spears that the Devil will send your way. The boylove boards won't supply you with that armor. If anything, they will strip you of what armor you already have."

"At Peace posts messages all the time about resisting sexual temptation." With difficulty, Johnnie turned his gaze from the cross in order to look at Paul.

Paul's eyes remained fixed upon the silent witness to the conversation. "And in the very next thread, Brick will explain how having sex with children is God's will. What the boylove boards give with one hand, they take away with another." He was silent a moment, his face changing in response to some thought. Then he said softly, "Johnnie, you're like a small boy who wants to venture onto a battlefield with his toy gun. You have no idea what it's like when the cannons start roaring. When the snows are falling so heavily that no vehicles can get through the streets except the snowplows and the busses, and your bus breaks down two miles from your home, and the man who was sitting next to you on the bus invites you to come warm yourself in his apartment before you start the long trek home, and you spend three hours talking and learn that you have many common interests, and then the man invites you to spend the night, and you know that he is not just offering to let you sleep on his couch— When something like that happens to you, you're going to need all the strength you have in order to say, 'No, thank you,' and walk out the door. And what armor the boylove boards have given you to resist such an encounter is as effective as a piece of paper is at stopping a bullet."

Johnnie stared down at the small gilded cross stamped into the binding of the Bible in the pew holder. Finally he said, "At Peace manages to resist temptation. You said that yourself."

"At Peace manages to resist temptation because his heart and mind have united together to resist any lures that his body might fall into. By contrast, your mind tells you not to have sex with boys, but your heart" – he touched the story in Johnnie's hands – "tells you otherwise. And Johnnie, when the time comes that you face your own day of temptation, you dare not have your heart and mind divided, because your body will cast the deciding vote."

Johnnie continued to stare at the tiny cross for several minutes. At length, he raised the back of his hand to wipe away the tear trailing down his cheek. He said in a strained voice, "So you're telling me I have to go back to the way I was before – without any friends like myself, with no one to talk with about being attracted to boys. I have to go back to my prison cell and lock myself in. What reason can you offer me to give up that much?"

He expected Paul to say something about the ex-gay ministries then, to speak of the joys of telling others, to offer him again an invitation onto the different path that he had chosen to follow. But when Johnnie looked up and saw that Paul had finally turned his eyes away from the looming cross, all that the other man said was, "You say that you love him. Do you?"

* * *

To: BL Board Administrators
From: brick@freespirits.org
Date: June 19, 11:24 CDT
Subject: More info on True Boylover and Ben

Below is an expanded version of a message I'll be posting at BoyChat this morning. This version (which is for your eyes only) supplies some extra information on the charges being placed against True Boylover.

# # #

I talked this morning with True Boylover's therapist, Jeff, and he's been able to give me more information on what happened.

Jeff says that the police learned about True Boylover and Ben through a tip on the state's child abuse hotline from someone who had been in correspondence with True Boylover. It appears that, when the police arrived at the front door of Ben's house, Ben guessed what had happened and ran out the back door, taking his family's cell phone with him. He called True Boylover at work; a co-worker overhearing the conversation says that True Boylover became very upset and told the caller that he'd meet him at "our place." What followed is as the news article describes, except that the article doesn't mention that Ben spoke in the letter about his fear of being separated from True Boylover.

The witness mentioned in the article, by the way, was Jeff, who drove down from the city when True Boylover didn't respond to his calls. He was the first to figure out where True Boylover and Ben might be, and he was the one who called the ambulance.

Jeff says that he talked with True Boylover over the weekend, and though he won't reveal what they said, he did mention (since this has been disclosed already in the local paper) that the hospital is keeping a suicide watch on True Boylover.

Jeff says that it seems likely now that True Boylover will be charged with statutory rape. The child pornography charge relates to images from Websites that the police say had been erased from True Boylover's computer in April but that they were able to recover. All of True Boylover's belongings have been searched. I'm afraid that True Boylover was never skilled in security measures, so I think we have to assume that the police now possess all of the e-mail sent to True Boylover since his arrival at BoyChat. I hope that everyone here has observed standard caution in what they commit to writing in e-mails, but if anyone here is worried about what the police might read, please don't panic. If you'll contact Free Spirits, we can give you tips on places to go for legal advice if the police show up at your doorway. (We can't give you any legal advice ourselves, of course.)

We'll continue to let you know more as details become available.

Brick
Webmaster and All-Round Dogsbody
BoyChat

Prayers for the tragedy
Posted at the Christian Boylove Forum by At Peace on Wednesday, June 20, at 7:14 AM

This is just a reminder to CBF participants that CBF hosts a prayer room (linked at the top of the main index) where prayers can be offered up in memory of Ben and to ask the Lord to provide True Boylover with strength and guidance during the coming days. In addition, Conscientious Objector runs a nonsectarian site for the lighting of candles in memory of the dead; I've linked to it below.

Our brothers over at BoyChat are engaging in a great deal of soul-searching at the moment, as you can tell from the hundreds of messages that have been posted on this topic since last Thursday. I hope that some of you will go over there to offer whatever help you can. This is not a time for division between Christian and non-Christian or between boylover and non-boylover. This is a time when our spirits ought to be unified in mourning and repentance.

On a separate note, I will be offline during the next few days in order to deal with some urgent real-life matters. Gold Star has kindly agreed to keep an eye on this board in the meantime. My prayers and thoughts will be with all of you this week, especially with the approach of our community's candle-lighting.

In Christ's Name,
At Peace with the Lord
Webmaster of CBF

Yes, I did it!
Posted at Crossroads by Concerned & Angry on Thursday, June 21, at 4:32 PM
In reply to CA, were you the one? posted by Conscientious Objector

Yes, I'm the one who called the police, and the rest of you should be ashamed that you didn't do so. For four months everyone here has been saying that [deleted by moderator] – excuse me, "True Boylover" – is unstable and needed psychiatric help. Yet no one had the sense or the courage to do what is right. That boy is dead because all of you pedophiles turn a blind eye when one of you hurts a child. That's the simple truth.

This is probably the last post I make at this board. Talking to you people is like trying to talk sense into a bunch of retarded grubs.

CA stands for Concerned & Angry (very angry)

* * *

"Thank you for not saying 'I told you so.'"

Delius shrugged. He was sitting in the black bedroom, where he'd moved his remaining computer. His face was yellow from the glow of the Christian Boylove Forum index. "It's hard to judge people online; I've made more than one mistake in my time. Besides, there's some truth to what Concerned & Angry said. Not that I believe the police should have been called – you can see how much good their presence did – but we could have done more than we did." Delius stopped, scanned a post with his eyes, then began to type, saying, "Lynch Em has found CBF and is posting multiple messages quoting Jesus' 'millstone about his neck' remark. At Peace is going to have a fit when he gets back. He has problems enough from self-appointed preachers warning the CBF participants that they're doomed to hell."

After a few moments more of typing, he added, "I knew True Boylover's name and address from the post I edited two weeks ago. I had enough money saved; I could have flown out to visit him. If I had . . ." His voice trailed off, and his hands slipped from the keyboard.

Johnnie said, "Paul thinks I should leave the boylove boards."

Delius looked at him, then away, his hand moving toward the mouse.

"Aren't you going to say anything?" asked Johnnie.

Delius clicked his mouse in a steady, methodical manner, his screen switching to CBF's administrative tools. "What would you have me say? It's an issue all of us face sooner or later. Conscientious Objector nearly left BoyChat during his first year there because he didn't believe that it was sufficiently activist. As for me, the first time I read one of C.O.'s posts, I thought to myself, 'What am I doing here? If I ever kiss a boy again, it will be because of posts like this.'" He gave a small shrug and said, without looking at Johnnie, "You're the only we who can make the decision, White Rose. If you don't want to come by any more, I'll understand."

"That's not what I meant," Johnnie said hastily. "Even if I left the boards, I'd still come see you—"

"In hell's name, why?"

Johnnie felt the breath shocked from him by the rough anger in Delius's voice. Swinging his body in the chair to face Johnnie, Delius said with hard precision, "I'm a boylover. I have boylove books on my shelves, boylove art on my walls, boylove designs on my computer, and I have the good fortune to be Gold Star, Webmaster of Crossroads, on whom the FBI are undoubtedly collecting a thick file. If the boylove boards are dangerous to you, Johnnie, then so am I. Don't do things by half measures. Follow your conscience completely, or don't follow it at all. I'd suggest the former. If you really think that boylove will cause you to harm a boy, you should walk right out of here."

The hallway was stifling hot, the kitchen even worse, as a pot of milk was simmering on the stove. Johnnie paused to turn the gas off, rinsed the empty cocoa container before placing it atop the growing stack on the computer stand, and stepped toward the door.

As he picked up his briefcase, something made him look back. Through the hall door, Delius was standing in the doorway to his room. He wasn't moving and he didn't speak, but something about his expression made Johnnie say quickly, "I'm not making an important decision like that all at once. I just have to go over to Milano's; I'm late for his lessons."

"Ah." Delius's expression didn't change, but a certain hard amusement entered his voice. "I'm glad to see that you still have hold of your proper priorities. The boys come first."

"Milano has always come first for me," said Johnnie, and left Gold Star standing at the entrance to his black cave.

* * *

"Good, she's watching a romance movie," said Milano, returning from the bathroom with the roots of his curly hair still wet from where he had washed his face.

"That's good?" Johnnie looked up from where he had been opening his briefcase in order to put away his calculator and take out a thin object wrapped in foil curled into a narrow cone.

"Sure," said Milano with apparent surprise. "Hadn't you noticed? When she starts watching one of these made-for-TV movies, she doesn't budge from her room till it's over. The house could burn down, and she wouldn't pay attention."

"So you have three hours to yourself." Johnnie had a hard time smiling; the burning down of a home was more than a metaphorical image for him these days. "Well, don't get yourself in trouble."

Milano stood at the doorway a moment, chewing his lip and blocking Johnnie's exit. Then he came up to stand beside his tutor. "What's that?" he asked, pointing to the soft object in Johnnie's hands.

"It's a present," he said, but before he could think of further words to add, Milano appeared to lose interest. He stared down at Johnnie's briefcase, as though the case were the most important object in the world, and said, "I was thinking about what you said a while back. About the inward part of you being the most important part. Do you still think that?"

"Yes, certainly," said Johnnie, trying to figure out how to bring the conversation back to where it had been headed. "That's one reason why people pick nicknames for themselves when they post messages on the Internet. They believe that their nicknames are a truer reflection of their inner selves than the names they were given at birth."

This appeared to interest Milano. He stood up straighter and said, "You post on the Internet, you said. What's your nickname?"

An eternity seemed to pass before Johnnie replied, "White Rose." The words fell simply, like a shooting star in the sky.

Milano lowered his brows. "Rose is a girl's name," he said doubtfully.

"I'm afraid I didn't think of that when I chose it. I got the name from a movie about a knight who gives a white rose to the person who is most important to him, and whom he intends to love forever."

Milano's face brightened; his mark of beauty stood out sharply. "The most important person?" he said.

"Yes."

Johnnie held his breath for a moment to formulate his words, but Milano did not give him the opportunity to speak further. He said, with eagerness edging his voice, "Johnnie, may I ask you a question?"

"Yes, of course." Johnnie wondered momentarily why he felt so uneasy. Though Milano, trained in formality by his parents, had never before addressed Johnnie by his first name, Johnnie's other young friends had. Then he realized how big an impact Delius's story concerning Teddy had had upon him. Milano was not Johnnie's equal; thankfully, Johnnie had never forgotten that fact, except in small lapses like this.

Milano lifted his head. He was still two inches shorter than Johnnie and had to raise his eyes as he said, "Are you gay?"

There was a long silence in which all Johnnie could hear were the faint sounds of the movie emerging from Sandra's room and the muffled chatter of Milano's sisters in the next room. Then Johnnie said, "What makes you think I am?"

"I heard Mama talking to Dad on the phone Monday evening – she sounded real sad. She said she'd thought that you were coming over to tutor me as a way to be able to see her, but you'd walked in on her while she was half undressed, and you hadn't even seemed to notice, so she figured you must be gay. Are you? It's really important for me to know."

Milano's hands were clenched together; the skin across his face-mark was taut. Seeing this, Johnnie, wondered whether it would be too much of a blow for Milano to learn with finality that Johnnie would not marry his mother. Then he remembered the gay boy with the broken arm, and he realized that Milano might be seeking assurance that it was possible to be different, yet to survive to a contented adulthood.

"Well, I'm not very interested in dating females," Johnnie said.

Relief washed across Milano's features. He lowered his lashes and stared for a moment at his hands before saying, "I was wondering . . . Do you think that people are only gay, or only straight, or do you think they can be something in between?"

"Bisexual? Why, certainly. I know someone who is attracted to males, yet he's marrying his girlfriend next month." So it seemed that Milano was indeed seeking reassurance about Johnnie's intentions toward his mother. Johnnie felt that he wasn't doing a good job of making clear that Milano shouldn't nourish his hopes for a stepfather.

Milano chewed on his lip for a moment more, then looked up and said, "I think I'm bisexual."

This was a turn of the conversation Johnnie had not expected. It took him a moment before he could gather his wits to say, "Thank you for telling me."

Milano smiled then, dipping his head slightly. "Thanks for not saying I'll outgrow it."

"How could I be sure of that? Mind you, I was a bit attracted to girls when I was in middle school, but that attraction went away as I grew older. Perhaps you'll lose your attraction to other boys."

"Maybe," Milano said cautiously. "But I know I'm bisexual now, and that's important."

Johnnie, thinking of Sandra's request that he impart to Milano "the birds and bees thing," found himself meditating on the vagaries of modern life. Apparently, being a twenty-first-century mentor meant giving fatherly advice, drawn from his own experience, on how a bisexual boy should lead his life. He wondered with amusement what role he would be called upon to play next.

"Could we become lovers?"

Milano's question was abrupt, almost peremptory. He had taken another step forward to where Johnnie stood frozen, his hands still wrapped about the foil-covered object.

He should have been prepared for this, he knew dimly, and the fact that he was not prepared was a sign to him of how far he had crossed his limits. He tried to gather his thoughts, but it was as though he had been journeying along a path that seemed clear, and a sudden, dark mist had descended upon him, so that he was now stumbling blindly. After a moment he said, "I don't think that would be a good idea."

"Why not? I love you, and you said that you love me – you do still love me, don't you?" He took another step closer, so that nothing barred the way between himself and Johnnie except the object in Johnnie's hands.

"Yes, of course." He could hear his voice beginning to rise in panic. "But there are different sorts of love—"

"I know that." Milano dipped his head and appeared to scrutinize the object Johnnie was holding, then raised his head again. He had on his face the stoic expression Johnnie had seen on their first meeting. "You're not attracted to me, are you? I know I'm ugly. But you wouldn't have to look at me . . . We could make love in the dark . . ."

No light was reaching Johnnie's mind now; he couldn't figure out whether it would be a worse disaster for him to follow his impulse to embrace the boy or for him to flee screaming from the room. He felt Milano's hand touch his tentatively.

And then, like a voice guiding him out of the mist, he heard the words: "If you ever consider having sex with a boy, I hope you'll discuss the matter with me." He found himself imagining such a conversation: "Well, of course I still believe what we talked about, but honestly, Gold Star, what was I to do? There he was, offering himself to me . . ."

And then the mist was gone, and Johnnie's mind was achingly clear, like that of a man falling from a cliff to his death.

He took two steps backward, placed the object atop his briefcase, and said firmly, "Look, it's not that. I'm not free to love you that way."

Milano was still standing with his hand outstretched. For a moment his mouth trembled, and it appeared that tears would be forthcoming. Then comprehension washed over his face. "You mean there's someone else?" he said hesitantly.

Johnnie paused a moment to select the words that would be most truthful. Then he said slowly, "I've been deeply in love with someone for several months now. If I were to love you in that way, I think it would hurt badly the person I love. I do love you, but I can't risk hurting him like that."

"I understand," Milano said swiftly. "I should have asked you first whether you were dating anyone. I was really stupid." He turned his attention to the briefcase, picking up the object there and fiddling with the edges of the foil.

"You weren't," said Johnnie. Then he added in the second biggest understatement of his life, "I was glad to know how you care about me."

Milano seemed disinclined now to look up; he continued to fiddle with the foil. As though on a note of protest at this treatment, the foil gave way suddenly, and the object in it fell into Milano's hands.

He held it up toward the light, staring. Johnnie felt his breath grow short. Milano asked, "Is this for your lover?"

"Yes," said Johnnie slowly, sensing the first glimpse of the ground rushing up to meet him. "It's for the person I love."

Milano looked at it for a moment more, then thrust it toward Johnnie. "It's from both of us, then," he said, his voice struggling to achieve an adult firmness. "If he's making you happy, then I'm glad."

Johnnie took the object back from him. His own hands were trembling. "Thanks," he said. "It's good to know that you feel that way." He turned toward his briefcase and said, his voice growing tight at the feel of a blow that was just beginning to enter him, "I'd better go. It looked as though it was about to rain cats and dogs when I got here, and I didn't bring an umbrella."

He took the briefcase in his hand and made his way across the galaxy's length of floor space that separated him from the door. He would have gone through the doorway without looking back, but he had had too much experience in mentoring to do that. He turned and saw that Milano was standing where he had left him, looking forlorn and uncertain.

"We'll have to start on those four-dimensional figures next time," Johnnie said, forcing himself to sound cheery.

"I have soccer practice on Fridays." Milano's voice was small.

"Yes, I remember. I'll see you on Monday, then." He could empathize all too well with the broken expression on Milano's face; he struggled for words that would heal at least one of the wounded persons in this room. Finally he said, "I was showing your picture a while back to a friend of mine who's also attracted to males. He was very much taken with your looks. He said you were unique in your beauty, and he asked me whether I had any other pictures of you."

Hope struggled with disbelief in Milano's face. "You're not making this up?" he said, his voice rising.

Johnnie shook his head. "I'd never lie to you." He left the boy standing next to his bed, a glow beginning to appear around the beauty mark as Johnnie made his way into the chill, driving rain, still clutching the object he had taken back from Milano.

He waited until he was out of sight of the house before dropping the white rose into the mud.

* * *

Notice to Crossroads participants
Posted at Crossroads by Gold Star on Thursday, June 21, at 5:30 PM

First of all, concerning the replies to Concerned & Angry's post below: I'd like to remind everyone here of the rules at this forum against the outing of participants. That includes the outing of non-boylovers. Any more posts providing real-life information about Concerned & Angry (whether obtained through the Web or through any other means) will result in the offenders being suspended from participation at Crossroads.

Secondly, concerning a number of queries the Crossroads Committee has received: The committee is presently discussing under what circumstances participants can be banned from Crossroads for outings that take place elsewhere. This is an old issue, and we want to proceed in as even-handed a manner as possible. Thoughts on this topic by non-boylovers would be especially appreciated.

Finally, for those of you who didn't see the notice at BoyChat, Ben's funeral is scheduled to take place from four to six p.m. tomorrow (Friday). Crossroads will be closed to posting during that time as our moment of silence.

Gold Star
Webmaster
Crossroads

Chapter Ten

Expand Alt Text

Happy International BoyLove Day!
Posted at Crossroads by Pedo-Hag (by proxy) on Thursday, June 21, at 5:35 PM

I'm going to be away from town till the end of the week of the solstice. (I still haven't figured out whether I'm supposed to celebrate IBLD in the winter or the summer, but I've grasped that everyone here parties around the time of the solstice.) So I'm asking Gold Star to post this for me then. I want all of you to know that, wherever I am, I'll be lighting a blue candle for you, and I'll also be lighting a blue candle on behalf of those of you who are afraid to light candles for fear that the flames will identify you as boylovers.

Last winter's International BoyLove Day was the best ever for me, because two days before it, a twelve-year-old boy came onto Crossroads and started asking questions about whether men who have sex with boys love those boys. Gold Star became concerned, dug up the e-mail address he'd deleted from the boy's first post, and wrote to the boy, asking him why he was interested in this topic. After a great deal of hesitation, the boy finally confessed that his father had been making the boy have sex with him, and he didn't know what to do.

Well, Gold Star ICQed me right away, and together we were able to persuade the boy to tell his mother. The last we heard, the boy's father had entered into therapy. Afterwards, all I could think was, "If Gold Star and I hadn't been running this board, that man would still be abusing his son." It made all the hours I spend trying to douse flame wars seem worth it.

This summer, I decided to dig up the first message I ever posted at Crossroads, eighteen months ago, in which I described what happened the first night my father molested me. Then I rewrote it from the perspective of my father, as though he had posted the message at BoyChat. I know that such a message wouldn't be permitted on BoyChat, since it describes illegal activities, but I've read enough posts from pro-sex boylovers to guess how it would have read.

Here is what I wrote eighteen months ago:

You imprisoned me with your arms and growled, "Do you love me?" I was so scared I didn't know what to do. I thought perhaps if I kissed you on the cheek, you'd let me go, but you moved your face and trapped my lips in yours. I wanted to scream, but I couldn't get away from you because you were holding me so tight, and I was afraid that, if I told you how much I hated you, you'd abandon me. You're always talking about how you plan to leave my mother because she doesn't love you.

Then you pinioned my wrist and took me into the bedroom and tore all my clothes off of me. I was shaking with fear, but you didn't pay me any mind; you just put me on the bed and took your pleasure on me. Even when I cried, you just smiled, as though my pain was what you enjoyed most. Afterwards, I was like a corpse, but you forced me to stay with you all night.

I hate you. I hate all of you pedophiles for destroying my life and the lives of other kids.

"Do you love me?" I asked shyly in a low voice. I was stiff with fear that she'd say no, but instead she stood on her tiptoes and gave me a passionate kiss. I was frozen with wonder; all I could do was cling to her. I thought I would start crying for joy.

I took her by the hand then and we went into the bedroom, where I undressed her, slowly and gently. She was shivering with excitement. I tried to make the foreplay last as long as I could, for her sake, but I'm afraid that when I entered her I was so eager that I hurt her a bit, because she cried the way my wife did on our wedding night. Afterwards, though, she was very calm and contented and lay in my arms till dawn.

To think that someone as wonderful as her loves me is something that humbles me. I just don't deserve anyone as special as she is. The fact that I can give her a little pleasure in return for all the happiness she has given me is the best gift I ever received.

So my International BoyLove Day message is in favor of better communication between all of us and our loved ones, so that we can find ways to draw closer to each other in love, in the hope that none of us, boylovers or non-boylovers, will be hurt by other people.

With all my love,
Pedo-Hag

* * *

The street had turned into a river. Cars had parked themselves at the curb, while the few pedestrians on the sidewalk had given up hope of controlling their umbrellas in the wind that caused the telephone lines to swing violently to and fro. Most of the pedestrians had taken refuge under the theater marquee; one couple, pressed close together to avoid a waterfall from a gutter spout, took the opportunity to exchange a few kisses. Some of the other pedestrians glanced at the couple, but only briefly. This was a cosmopolitan part of the city, and gay couples were not likely to rouse much interest.

Another couple – a teenage boy and girl, in this case – came rushing into the shelter, laughing loudly as they beheld each other's drenched appearance. The boy ruffled the girl's hair; she gave him a mock blow to the chest. Several of the pedestrians smiled.

Johnnie, watching them from the dark room above, sipped on his cold cocoa. His gaze traveled to a family group: a mother, a father, and their half-grown son. He looked away abruptly and turned to place the cup on his desk.

His apartment door crashed open then with such force that, in any other mood, Johnnie's thoughts would have been upon FBI raids. As it was, he merely stared blankly at the figure in the doorway. He could vaguely see that it was dripping on his carpet.

"Sorry," said Delius. "I was trying to knock, but your door was ajar." He hesitated, then added, "Is it all right if I come in?"

"Sure." Johnnie realized with incredulity that his voice sounded no different than usual.

The reply must have reassured Delius. He pulled off his backpack and tossed it onto the bare table, then began shedding himself of his drenched coat. "Jesus, what a night!" he said. "First my umbrella blows out of my hand when I'm halfway home, and then Brick pages me a message asking me to respond to one of his e-mails immediately, and then I've no sooner reached my building than all the lights on our street go out. Mind if I borrow your laptop to check my mail?"

"It's on the coffee table," said Johnnie.

"I'd better dry myself off first, or I'll be electrocuted. If you don't mind me making free use of your bathroom . . ."

"There's a flashlight on the counter."

"Thanks, I can grope my way there. We perverts are accustomed to spending our nights lurking in the dark, didn't you know?" He disappeared through the bathroom doorway.

Johnnie slowly made his way over to the table, picked up the coat from where Delius had dropped it, placed it on the coat rack, and turned his attention to the bookbag. After several minutes and a quantity of paper towels, the table and the bag were drier than before. Johnnie opened the bag to see whether any of its contents had been damaged.

Only two objects lay within the bag: the thermos Johnnie had given Delius, and a black binder. Johnnie pulled the binder out and took it over to the window to inspect it by the flashing light of the theater opposite and the flicker of a small flame.

The blue candle had grown low as the evening lengthened; now its flame was little more than a spark, but it was still the brightest light in the room. Glancing out the window, Johnnie saw a police car cruise slowly down the street. A police officer looked up toward Johnnie's window, causing time to stand still momentarily for Johnnie. Then she switched her gaze away indifferently.

The binder opened easily, without damage from water, to a page labelled, "Age 35."

Delius, Johnnie noticed, had begun adding stars again, earlier during the year. Row by row they twinkled at him: gold star and gold star and gold star, the monotony broken only by a single black-bordered star six weeks before. Johnnie tried to remember back to the previous month's events to see whether Delius had mentioned the boy, but his mind refused to focus itself.

He turned a page. Three hundred sixty-five blank boxes confronted him; three hundred sixty-five days be filled. The page read, "Age 36."

He turned to the next page. Three hundred sixty-five blank boxes; three hundred sixty-five stars to be added. "Age 37."

He had reached the page labelled "Age 62" when Delius emerged from the bathroom, rubbing his hair dry with a towel. "I borrowed your bathrobe," said Delius. "I hope you don't mind." Without waiting for an answer, he picked up the telephone, listened for a moment, then slammed down the receiver. "The telephone lines are down as well – damn, no modem access! Oh, well, Brick can stew over the emergency on his own for a while. I have worse things to worry about: an entire evening without the Internet. It's the boylover's worst nightmare, you know. Conscientious Objector wrote a satire once about all of the computer knowledge of the world being lost in a disaster. It turns out that the only people who could reconstruct the Internet were boylovers—"

He stopped abruptly. Johnnie, staring down at the elderly couple standing arm in arm, thought to himself that the thunderstorm must be growing worse, for the rain was now blurring the images on the street. Then he realized that the water blurring his vision did not come from the rain.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. Delius said quietly, "Come tell me what has happened."

They ended up sitting on the day bed together; Delius made Johnnie drink all of the warm cocoa in his thermos. By the time the cocoa was finished, so was the tale. Johnnie leaned back against Delius's arm, which was resting atop the back of the day bed, and thought to himself that it was a shame that Delius did not have a young friend, because Gold Star would have had a comforting effect on any boy who wished to talk with him.

The electrical power was still off. Turning his head, Johnnie could see the outline of Delius's profile, bright from the theater glow, while the nearer side of his face was blurred by darkness. Under the steady sound of water falling from the sky, Johnnie remembered an image that had been offered to him late one night when Delius seemed reluctant to return to his apartment: of a newly released prisoner turning up at the doorstep of his family's home, and of a doorside basin of holy water spilling its contents as the door was slammed in the prisoner's face.

Staring down at the abandoned thermos, Delius asked, "Do you think you did the right thing?"

"I know I did," said Johnnie. "Everything I said to Milano was true. Whether you're right or Paul is right, one way or another it's likely that Milano would have been hurt if I'd said yes. If it hadn't been for your story – and Pedo-Hag's and Concerned & Angry's and True Boylover's – I might have been tempted to tell Milano, 'We can't sleep together, but we can still be lovers in our hearts.' As it was, though . . ."

Delius's gaze remained fixed upon the thermos. "You don't think that Conscientious Objector is right?"

Johnnie shook his head. "I don't think I hurt Milano badly by turning him down – and after all, if he goes on to date other people, he's likely to be rejected on a few occasions. Maybe I've given him a gentle preparation for that."

"Still," said Delius softly, "it hurts like hell being the one to say no, doesn't it?"

Johnnie was silent for a while, looking at the sun-golden glow of the neon lights upon his dark walls. Finally he said, "It's not the sex. Despite everything that Conscientious Objector and Paul say about the indivisibility of body and heart and mind, it's not that. If need be, I could take daily cold showers. It's just . . ." He groped for the words, aware of little other than Gold Star's arm behind him. "Every night, I do the same routine before bed. I make myself a cup of cocoa and stand at the window for a while, watching the couples walk by hand in hand. Then I close down my computer, clear away the remains of my dinner-for-one carton, use the bathroom, and go to bed alone. And then I lie awake for an hour, thinking about what it's like to live my life alone, and thinking about how it will remain that way for the rest of my life. If Milano and I had entered into a relationship together – even for a short time, even if it didn't involve any sex – then we could have been special to each other, centered upon each other. And then we would have had that bond for the rest of our lives, like Conscientious Objector and his older friend do. I would have gone to bed each night knowing that my life was so bound with another person's that I had added something essential to his life.

"But as it was, I looked at your star binder tonight and . . . Oh, gods, Delius, twenty thousand blank boxes to be filled. Twenty thousand days of emptiness and loneliness, and nothing to fill them except the cold satisfaction of knowing I've done my duty. Twenty thousand days without someone in my life. . . . Delius, I just can't face it—"

Delius halted the flow of choked words abruptly by pulling Johnnie into a tight embrace. Johnnie burrowed his face against the hollow of Delius's shoulder, feeling the bathrobe grow wet from his tears. For a long time, the flow of salt water continued, as though matching in its intensity the rush of water outside. Finally Johnnie lifted his head. Delius was still holding him close, though his face was turned, not toward Johnnie, but toward the pattern of light against the wall. In a shaking voice, Johnnie said, "Tell me your secret. You must have found a way to fill all those blank boxes."

"Must I?" Delius's voice was quiet; he did not shift his gaze.

"Yes, otherwise you wouldn't have begun pasting stars in the notebook again, for all those boys you were tempted by."

"Well," said Delius, "it hasn't been boys recently."

Thunder purred distantly, withdrawing to the edge of the city. The pounding of rain began to slacken. Delius continued to look at the wall opposite with the same sort of intense focus he adopted when designing a Website. Johnnie, confronted with this unmoved gaze, shifted in Delius's embrace. Delius let him go immediately, and even stirred in the day bed as though preparing to rise.

Johnnie caught hold of his hand. Delius turned his face then; Johnnie could read little in his shadowed expression but for the tautness of his straight mouth.

Leaning forward, Johnnie kissed him on the lips.

Delius accepted the kiss without withdrawing, but did not move his lips in response. When Johnnie moved back, he could see that Gold Star's expression had tightened still further. For a moment, Johnnie had a vision of Delius in the city gym, confronting his incubus.

Johnnie wondered whether his own expression was just as tightly controlled. "Did I just lose you a star?" he asked.

"I'm afraid so," replied Delius. "No star for today, no star at the end of the year."

His voice was light, almost self-mocking; Johnnie recognized the tone. All it would take, he realized, was some subtle signal from himself, and Delius would turn this into a joke, as he had the previous month. The thought gave Johnnie a feeling of desperate haste, as though he had sighted a handsome boy just turning the corner. He caught hold of Delius's hand again and cried, "Why didn't you tell me last month that you're attracted to me?"

"Because I'm not." Delius's voice was painfully matter-of-fact. "Not that way, at any rate."

The rain had lessened to a light trickle. Voices came from the window as the pedestrians who had been sheltering at the theater began to emerge onto the streets again. Faintly, Johnnie heard the half-broken voice of the teenage boy, talking to his girlfriend, but he barely registered this fact. His mind was falling back to an old conversation. "You told me," he said slowly. "You told me last month that you'd been looking for someone. I didn't realize— Why didn't you tell me that I was the one you wanted?"

"What would you have had me say?" Delius's voice was still too light, still too detached from the words he spoke. He had returned to gazing at the wall. "Johnnie, I've been searching for ten years for another boylover who I could love and share my life with – how could I have told you that? You were ready to go to bed with me out of pity; it would have been like asking Pedo-Hag to marry me. Pity isn't what I'm looking for. I'm not searching for someone from whom I can take and take and take, and give no return." He turned his face toward Johnnie; the anger on it was plain to see. "If that's what's going through your mind – giving me a present that will never be returned – I'll leave right now." He shifted forward to the edge of the day bed.

"What?" said Johnnie. "And waste all that fine grooming you've been doing for the past six months?"

Delius's brow was creased with black anger. He opened his mouth. Then his mouth remained open as he looked at Johnnie, who was biting his lip in an effort to keep control. After a moment, Johnnie abandoned the effort; after a moment more, Delius abandoned the effort to be angry. With one accord, they fell into each other's arms and howled with laughter.

After a time, the laughter ended like the rain, but Johnnie made no effort to raise his head from the shoulder on which it was resting. He could feel, even through the thickness of the bathrobe, the pounding of Delius's heart. Johnnie said, "Your heart sounds as though it's holding a party. Are you sure that you don't desire me with your body?"

Delius chuckled softly; his cheek was pressed against the top of Johnnie's head. "Place your hand a little lower, and you'll encounter proof that I'm not. There are more kinds of excitement in life than sexual excitement, as Paul would say."

"Paul." Johnnie unconsciously moved his body closer to Delius's warmth. "Paul would say that I'm straying from the higher path."

"Yeah, well, Conscientious Objector would say the same to me, though for different reasons. I suppose that, if we do this, a number of our friends will be disappointed."

Johnnie raised his head from the shoulder and traced with his eye the curves of Delius's face, now relaxed in the darkness. "What is it that we're doing?" Johnnie asked. "I'm not entirely sure I know."

"Whatever it is that you want," Delius replied promptly. "If you want things to stay the way they are, that's fine. Just the fact that I can tell you how I feel means something to me. If you'd like to be lovers . . . Well, I know some other boylovers who have been in our situation, and they've given me a few hints on how to partially overcome the minor detail that we're not attracted to each other. On the other hand, if the idea of us bedding each other doesn't appeal to you, we could be 'domestic companions' of the sort that Paul always talks about. It's up to you; sex isn't the essence of what I'm searching for."

"What is the essence?" asked Johnnie, his gaze rising to the glint of gold shining in Delius's hair. "What is it that you've been searching for?"

Delius was silent for a moment, his arms resting lightly around Johnnie. His expression was filled with the same concentration he showed when composing a particularly important administrative post. At last he said, "I suppose that I disagree with Paul and Conscientious Objector about their theory of the need for body and heart and mind to work in harmony with each other. I agree that it's nice when body and heart and mind all cooperate with the conscience, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary that they do so. Provided that at least one part of us obeys the commands of the conscience, then I think we're on the right path. . . . Today, when Milano asked you to become his lover – what parts of you said yes?"

"My body," said Johnnie slowly. "And my heart. My mind is the part that vetoed the idea."

"So your mind followed your conscience, and all is well. White Rose, I've just asked you to be my life partner – whether sexual or nonsexual is up to you. What do the different parts of you say?"

Johnnie could read Delius's anticipation of his reply more in the sudden tension of his body than in the returned sobriety of his expression. The rain had ended now, though the room remained in darkness.

"My body isn't throwing a party."

"And your heart and mind?"

Delius had returned to his note of careful neutrality; Johnnie caught his gaze before he could turn it away. "My heart and mind are yours," he said quietly. "Is that what you've been seeking? My heart and mind?"

For a moment, Delius was frozen, as though unable to reply. Then he said with simplicity, "No. To give you mine."

Johnnie reached forward then and pulled Delius into his arms. The latter came without resistance, laying his head upon Johnnie's chest, with his face turned upwards. For several minutes, Johnnie was silent, tracing the silver scar on Delius's arm and looking down at Delius's eyelids, which were closed. Finally Johnnie said, "Paul was right about one thing."

"What is that?" Delius's voice was muffled against his chest.

"Eros and philia aren't the highest loves."

* * *

The apartment was white with afternoon sun by the time Johnnie returned home. The street noise, barely muffled, filled the apartment. Johnnie stood a moment at the doorway, surveying the empty room, then pushed aside the clutter of dishes on the table and carefully placed the bag of cookies in the middle, like a centerpiece. He propped next to it the accompanying card.

Dear Johnnie (Mr. Steadman),

I told Mama last night about me being bisexual, and she wasn't at all angry, not even about the fact that I'd told you first. Mama did say that I shouldn't have asked you to have a relationship with me. She says that only pedos have sex with boys my age. Will you accept my apology? I didn't mean to imply that you're a pedo.

Mama says she doesn't mind us still being friends, even though you're gay. She says she's just miffed that you haven't introduced her to your partner.

I'd like to meet him too. Have you told him yet about the circle?

Love,
Milano

P.S. Mama baked the cookies, but they're from both of us.

Benjamin Christopher Walters

Johnnie looked at the dates printed below the words. Ben's eleventh birthday, he noted, would have taken place in a week's time. He wondered whether True Boylover had bought the birthday present.

He dried his hands with a paper towel, placed that towel in the newly purchased trash can, and was about to turn away when he noticed a small icon at the bottom of the computer screen. It was bright yellow, and it contained the words: "I want to kill . . ."

Slowly he moved forward and clicked on the icon. The icon sprang open to become a CBF page.

I want to kill myself
Posted at the Christian Boylove Forum by At Peace on Friday, June 22, at 4:20 PM

Johnnie read the message rapidly, the phrases running through his mind like the familiar refrain of an ancient ballad: The pastor whom At Peace thought he could trust . . . Now everyone in his community knew . . . He was barred from attending church services . . . He had been fired from his job . . . The police had visited him and had found no evidence of crime but had warned him to stay away from the children in the community . . . His brother was convinced that he'd molested his niece . . . His parents were standing by him but insisted that he enter into therapy . . .

There were about two dozen replies to the post, several from BoyChat participants who never posted at CBF. "Don't do it, dear," said a subject heading by Conscientious Objector.

Johnnie scanned the list of names twice, but one name was missing. He clicked at a second icon at the bottom of the page, this one green, and a post popped up.

* * *

The latest
Posted at the Crossroads Committee Forum by Gold Star on Friday, June 22, at 5:45 PM
In reply to I'm concerned about what's happening at CBF! posted by Pedo-Hag

Here's the situation: At Peace has been exchanging e-mails with Brick for several months now. When the stress started to get to At Peace yesterday evening, he sent Brick an e-mail indicating that he needed to talk with him urgently. Unfortunately, Brick was heading out the door to pick up his fiancée at the airport, so he passed on the message to me, asking me to write to At Peace. I was offline until a short while ago, though, so I didn't see Brick's e-mail.

When Brick failed to respond, At Peace tried writing some other BL friends, but apparently they were all slow at checking their mail. Finally, late today, At Peace wrote a message about what was happening. He tried first to post it at Crossroads, since he knew a number of participants here, but you'd already disabled posting on the board. So instead he posted it at BoyChat.

Unfortunately, he did so just moments before BoyChat's main index was replaced with the memorial page, which will remain up while Ben's funeral is taking place. When he saw his message disappear from BoyChat, At Peace lost control of himself entirely and posted his suicide note at CBF.

Well, you know how few visitors CBF gets on the weekends; it might have been days before anyone noticed the post. Fortunately, Paul saw it almost immediately and began sending e-mails to every boylover in his address book.

Brick and I have been on the phone with At Peace, and he's a lot calmer now. At Peace thinks his parents just want advice from someone besides himself on what sort of help he should receive, so I'm planning to fly out to visit At Peace next weekend and explain to his parents how peer support groups can be an alternative to therapy.

What this episode brings home, of course, are the limitations on what sort of help the boylove community can provide to its members through cyberspace alone. Coincidentally, I was discussing this topic last night with a boylover who's planning to come out to his parents when he sees them next. We've decided to start a local support group for any boylovers who may live in our area, and we're hoping to connect with non-boylovers (ped or non-ped) who would be interested in talking with us. For example, there's an ex-gay group near us whose members might be approachable, and the boylover I was talking with has met a minister who could be worth getting to know.

Think of us as a real-life Crossroads.

That's all that I can say at the moment. Perhaps Johnnie, who posts more than I do at CBF, can add something when he comes online.

Gold Star

* * *

Sitting down on a crate next to the computer, Johnnie typed a short note in reply, saying only that he hoped to make real-life contact with At Peace as well. His gaze was already beginning to wander before he clicked the "Send Message" button; he was watching a red light blink nearby. After a moment's hesitation, he reached over and hit the play button.

The answering machine rewound with a satisfied purr, and a disembodied voice said, "This is Paul responding to Delius's message. Gold Star, it's a delight to hear from you. I'd sort of gathered that Johnnie had someone important in his life, but I didn't want to press him about this, since I know how much he values his privacy. Of course I'd love to join the two of you for dinner. I'll be by at six tomorrow, and I'll bring the wine . . ."

Johnnie gradually became aware of what he was sitting on. He stood up, looked down at the crate full of shirts, and picked it up, placing the briefcase atop it.

The hallway's light was off, a new light switch having been installed the previous week. Johnnie paused in front of Delius's door, which was ajar; a beam of sunlight poured through the opening. The crate was still in his arms, though, so he continued down the hallway. As he did so, he passed pictures, recently moved to the hallway: Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the spider, Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet, Harry Cat and Tucker Mouse, the Water Rat and the Mole . . . The pictures of friends living together ended at the entrance to the library.

Inside the room, a small tornado had hit. Half the bookshelves had been moved to make room for Johnnie's day bed and desk; Delius had even set up his laptop, whose screen was blank at the moment. Delius's books, though, had not yet been moved. Piles of them were scattered across the floor, nudging the crates containing Johnnie's belongings.

He had put down the crate and was rummaging through the briefcase when he sighted the stars.

Standing up slowly, with his hand still clutching the object he had touched last in the briefcase, he gazed a long moment before walking over to the wall nearest the door. Where the children's illustrations had once hung, the wall was now filled with dozens of sheets of paper, glittering golden in the sun. The first fifteen pages had the familiar pattern of gold stars neatly pasted in rigid rows. Row upon row the stars stood, monotonous, constrained by the boxes holding them.

The remaining forty pages were different. Gold glitter had been sprayed wildly upon the sheets in whirling patterns; the only neat element was a single, large star affixed to the middle of each page.

Stepping backwards to see better the golden pages near the top of the ceiling, Johnnie bumped into his desk. As he did so, his computer sprang to life, throwing forth onto the screen a shower of golden stars as chimes rang like festival bells.

As the screen cleared, the familiar moonscape landing appeared, with its blue triangle logo in the middle. Stars now danced in the dark sky, and the logo was shimmering with stardust. Words appeared on the screen:

Even if the laws should change, you'll be the one I want.

For a moment, Johnnie could not speak. He felt caught out of time, as though this had happened long ago. Delius said nothing; he simply smiled.

Then Johnnie stepped forward and said, "I bought this for you."

He handed Gold Star the white rose.

The author would like to thank the editors of this novel, who, for obvious reasons, are not named here.

Publication history.

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This text, or a variation on it, was originally published at duskpeterson.com as part of the series Master/Other. Copyright © 2007 Dusk Peterson. Some rights reserved. The text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0). You may freely print, post, e-mail, share, or otherwise distribute the text for noncommercial purposes, provided that you include this paragraph. The author's policies on derivative works and fan works are available online (duskpeterson.com/copyright.htm).

Illustration (Crossroads home page, February 28) by Dusk Peterson. The Crossroads design is adapted with permission of the Crossroads Committee and of the original designer, Hooked.