§ê¢rꆧ wrote:By most lights, I would have been a 'wild children', and honestly at 14 would have adored hooking up with Hakim Bey, nasty old dirty man that he is, even though I really wasn't into males, just to have an experience with such a poet and thinker would have been exhilarating. And if it had happened, I really don't think my mind could ever process it as an act of predatation.
This is the part I don't really get. Why would the fact that someone
in their books is a great poet and thinker make you any more (or, for that matter, less) likely to submit to sexual attention from them as a straight (or even gay) male? Intelligence and charisma and knowledge and power are obviously attractive to both sexes - regardless of sex, in fact - but where does the actual
sex come in? I got a lot from Colin Wilson's books as a pre-teen, and as a teenager, and I admired a lot of other writers and activists and thinkers, too - but it just never occurred to me that they might want to fuck me, or I them.
Saying that, I once got a dangerously flirtatious letter, at the age of thirteen, from the son of a very famous English novelist (not an Amis) - and at the time, knowing no better, I probably woulda let him, so to speak, if we'd met.
It's the
not knowing better part that matters. I now know I wasn't, and would never have been, the only "young man" this guy wrote to - and that the "exhilarating experience" of "becoming his Muse" would've been that of being humped by an old man and cast aside for the next lad.
NAMBLA may well be a "discussion group" as Ginsberg called it - a place where intelligent and cultured men meet to discuss Platonic love and Eros and the multi-facetted face of the divine as represented in the critically anarchic (so many reversals!) symbol of a man penetrating a boy.
Do you honestly think they ever wasted time talking, far less arguing, with the
boys about all this?! An NRA member who talks to the animals - that I can believe. A strain of anarchist thought which believes in the
ultimate expression of patriarchy, and of "might makes right" - that, sadly, I have no choice but to believe in.
The fact that no victims have come forward - all too easy to believe, and understand.
I'm sorry, but in a lot of ways, it would seem Hakim Bey is being pilloried not because he is a low down pedo, but because he writes poetry about it, which is somehow worse (?).
It's the opposite, in my case anyway. I think he has been spared and excused for a long time because he is not seen as a low down paedo (though he is) but a great poet, thinker and activist (activist
how, by the way? Going to the middle east and writing a few books doesn't make you an activist. Leaving Iran because of the Islamic revolution, even as a foreign-born Sufi, does make you a coward, though. Did he prefer the Shah? Did SAVAK leave him be?).
Sorry, Secrets, I am not aiming all this at you. I agree with Joe that your post was brave and honest. It's Hakim Bey and the overall
elitism of radicalism that is annoying me.
My posts are too long. To sum up, I won't stop reading the good work of Burroughs or Clarke or Ginsberg or anybody just because I find them a bit dodgy in their personal lives. Good work is good work - bad work is bad. There are people who had their porches and patios built by Fred West and John Wayne Gacy who have no known complaints, and that's fine. The personality produces the work - but the work is separate from the man. So the parts of Bey you enjoyed you should still enjoy, just as I'll still enjoy Ginsberg, and Larkin (racist who wrote long prose fantasies about schoolgirls) and J.M. Barrie (functional paedophile who wrote Peter Pan - a functional paedophile is one who does not act on their desires) and D.H. Lawrence (wife-beater, child-beater, and all-round Grade-A arsehole).
Only joking about Lawrence. I never enjoyed him. Compared to him, Fred West was a writer.
Dylan Thomas was a