SENSUOUS PEDERASTY: THE SPORT OF KINGS BY PARKER ROSSMAN
The following is one of the sections of the first chapter of Dr. Parker Rossman’s Sexual Experience Between Men and Boys (originally published in 1976), entitled "Dimensions of a Complex Problem", introduced here. His intention in this chapter was to give an unavoidably simplified but general idea of the different types of pederast and their prevalence. Actually, however, his evidence was mostly limited to what was then recent in countries with a Christian tradition.
Sensuous Pederasty: The Sport of Kings
Adventurism may lead to a more sensual pederasty which in some criminal and prison environments is often called “the sport of kings,” reminiscent perhaps of the Oriental “kept boy” portrayed in such novels as The Persian Boy[1] or Kyra Kyralina.[2] This was the sensuous pederasty of Roman emperors, Turkish sultans, Richard the Lion Hearted,[3] or the more recent Sultan of Bukhara, who took into exile with him his harem of boys instead of his wives. While the sports-comrade type of pederast indulges only in the sex play his boy desires, the sensate pederast uses boys for his own pleasure, as portrayed in the opening pages of the Kazantzakis novel. Jules Romains[4] describes sexual dalliance in Tunisia with young boys of a “high level of beauty,” whose sexually provocative and seductive dancing, freedom from inhibitions, and persistence in devoting themselves to erotic pleasures, made them more entertaining in bed than women, because they had more sexual fire and were always coming up with erotic surprises. The spirit of such sensuous pederasty is present in the ancient slogan, still often repeated: “A woman for love and children, but a boy for pleasure.”[5]
A black pimp who trained young teen-age boys[6] reported that he considered a high percentage of his sensuous pederast customers to be jaded heterosexuals who were seeking new types of exotic experience for their party guests and for themselves. For example, they often wanted girls and boys at once. Such behavior, of course, is rooted in the present sexual disarray of Western society, in the cynical self-seeking, pleasure-seeking attitude which easily becomes exploitive. The boy who views girls as “lays” to be used and discarded may quite easily become the man who is willing to “do anything for kicks,” as in the spirit of the English king in the film Lion in Winter who reported that he had tried sexual intercourse with a young boy. Such men may not be pederasts at all, but simply sensate persons who seek new erotic experiences out of curiosity, like the heterosexual who prowls the homosexual bars just for a new experience.
The pimp of boys, however, is likely to be a pederast of the sensuous type who has developed “a taste for young flesh” while incarcerated in a correctional institution. Many gangsters are pederasts, at least at times, for no environment is as effective and seductive in forming sensuous pederast tastes as the correctional institution for juveniles. Such tastes and habits can also be developed overseas with boy prostitutes who are well-trained in erotic skills, or even through a series of sexual experiences with an ordinary boy who plunges eagerly into sexual experimentation, as illustrated by the previously mentioned autobiographical novel Kyra Kyralina,[7] in which a man tells how quickly and easily as a young boy his sexual experience with a man became sensuous and addicting. A similar experience is reported by a cautious and conservative junior-high-school teacher we shall call Mike Milkey, who for twenty years kept his pederastic desires in check, priding himself on having never in his life crossed the line into illegal sexual activity. His many close paiderastia friendships with boys had been chaste and platonic until he encountered a boy whose insatiable sexuality broke down all his inhibitions. The heady wine of his unfolding sexual experience with this enthusiastic boy transformed Mike into a sensuous pederast who can write: “This marvellous experience would be worth twenty years in prison. It has been like a conversion experience for both of us. For the first time in my life I’m open now to all sorts of new erotic sensations. My relationships with women are much more satisfying and my boy is now a ladies, man no girl can resist.”
[1] Mary Renault, The Persian Boy. New York: Pantheon, 1972 [Author’s note]. The narrator of this superb and historically very accurate novel, Bagoas, is depicted as the catamite of the Persian King Darius III when aged 12 to 15, roughly 333-330 BC.
[2] The author’s footnote here leads to N. Kazantzakis, Greek Passion, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953, and it would seem that “Kyra Kyralina” in the main text is a mistake for “Greek Passion.”
[3] As often, Rossman exaggerates and becomes generally unreliable when he ventures into the remote past. As the scholarly article on Richard Coeur de Lion (1157-99) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says, “The late twentieth-century idea that he was homosexual is based upon an anachronistic interpretation of the evidence, though in the final analysis his sexuality must remain unknown.” Certainly, it is far too little known to characterise it as “sensual pederasty”. The male most often suspected by moderns of having been his lover, the 21-year-old King of France in 1187, was most definitely not his kept boy.
[4] Jules Romains, The Seventh of October. New York: Knopf, 1946, vol. 27. [Author’s note]
[5] A. Edwardes, Jewel in the Lotus (New York: Julian Press, 1959); Fosco Mariani, Where Four Worlds Meet (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1964.), pp. 87 ff. [Author’s note]
[6] See “Boys for Sale,” Village Voice (New York), Feb. 8, 1973. [Author’s note]
[7] Panait Istrati, Kyra Kyralina. New York: Knopf, 1926. [Author’s note]
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