GREEK LOVE IN THE AMERICAS
Bernal Díaz's eye-witness account of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1519-21 includes several brief mentions of Aztec pederasty, as well as showing the prominence the conquistador Cortés gave to stamping out sodomy.
Hubert Howe Bancroft’s monumental The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America, published in five volumes in New York in 1875-6, included several references to pederasty, while showing that much of the indigenous practise of it was in the form of gender-differentiated homosexuality, with boys adopting, apparently indefinitely, the behaviour of women. The traditional North American Indian tales published by Bernard Sexton in 1921 as Gray Wolf Stories do not mention Greek love, but mention so many of the peculiar customs associated with it that they are a rich source of surmise for lost knowledge as to how some tribes are likely to have practised Greek love, as explained in a review.
Greek love in French Guiana, 1870s is a 19th-century French doctor's account of pederastic practices in a land then best-known for its brutal penal colonies.
The Trumaí of Brazil is an account by an anthropologist who lived with this Amazonian tribe in 1938, which describes the sexual activity of the boys as consisting of sex with one another and, initiated by them, with the men.
American writer Erskine Lane recorded his reflections on his erotic encounters in Guatemala in the 1970s with youths of 15 to 22 in his journal Game-Texts.
Greek Love in Colombia in the 1970s-80s is one unnamed man's brief account of his experiences as both boy and man.
The United States of America
Homosexuality Among Tramps by Josiah Flint is an authoritative essay, published in 1897 in the first scientific English-language study of homosexuality, which describes Greek love as the predominant form of sex amongst tramps and hoboes in the USA.
"Jockers" and "Punks" in the early 20th-century north-western USA explores the diverse reasons why working-class boys often sought out sexual relationships with men.
Scotty Bowers on his boyhood is an Illinois boy's account of his Greek love adventures in the 1930s, notable for the influence positively-felt early experience seems to have had in developing the narrator's lifelong pansexual enthusiasm, as suggested in a review here. It also brings to life the hustlers' scene in the Chicago of that era.
The playwright Tennessee Williams described an orgy with a Ganymede of 15 in a letter to a friend in 1943.
"Response to Adolescence: An Educator’s Story" is Parker Rossman's short biography of the American intellectual and boy-lover Paul Goodman, fashionable in the 1960s, told in the first person from his own writings.
An American initiated in war-time Naples, 1943-67 is the account of one George C. as to how he had become sexually enthusiastic about boys. In the context of North America, where the notion of fixed sexual orientation had taken hold as firmly and as long as anywhere, and with far-reaching consequences for people's self-perception, George's account is especially interesting as an instance of the survival there into the 1960s of pre-modern assumptions about sexuality. George explains his willingness to try out sex with a boy as occasioned purely by his strong sex drive combined with circumstance, and his eventual preference for boys in middle age as learned from experience. Likewise, Ben, the boy with whom he had his most important affair, beside his need for love, wanted sex with men only because they offered an outlet for his exceptionally strong sexual urges, not because he was "gay".
The Strange Case of Dr. Dooley is the story of a doctor in Connecticut who had sex with troubled boys as a successful therapy, and to whose support the local worthies rallied when he was prosecuted in 1955.
Fifteen American case studies ranging in date from the 1930s to 1964 were presented in Some Uncomplicated Greek Love Affairs and Some Difficult Greek Love Affairs, two chapters from Greek Love by J. Z. Eglinton.
Another nine case studies ranging from 1946 to 1970 were presented in The Male Adolescent Involved With a Pederast Becomes an Adult, for which psychologist R. H. Tindall selected the nine cases of pederasty out of 200 he had studied "where the most detailed follow-up in regard to sexual practices was possible." All nine boys had begun their liaisons with men willingly at 13 or 14, and the sex, which in every case was only part of a valued relationship, had petered out some time after they were 17. His most significant finding was that all later married and none regarded themselves as homosexual, leading him to conclude that liaisons with men did not make boys homosexual.
The United States in Boys for Sale by Drew and Drake (1969) is a short history of boy prostitution there. Boy Prostitution in New York in 1968, A survey of eighteen New York boy prostitutes and A biography of Len, a New York pimp are parts of their detailed survey of New York in the late 1960s for the same book. Under his reak name of Parker Rossman, Drake went on to write to one of the few book-length studies of Greek love, Sexual Experience Between Men and Boys (1976), some of which was general, but parts of which were entirely based on recent interviews with Americans, including his studies of The Ladder Down, The Consenting Boys, Support from Adolescent Culture. and Are There Solutions?. Boy prostitution in the last years before it was virtually eliminated through suppression and recounted well and extremely unusually by a boy involved in it is the subject of Diary of a Dirty Boy by Luis Miguel Fuentes (1998), whose uncle told a similar story of himself in about 1973.
Writing under the pen name of Casimir Dukahz, Brian Otto Drexel (1909-88), an American boysexual (to use the word he coined himself) wrote four successive books recounting his sexual adventures with boys: The Asbestos Diary, Vice Versa, It's a Boy, and Growing Old Disgracefully. Unsurprisingly, he obscured the question of whether they were memoirs or fiction with the typically witty disclaimer that "all characters and incidents ... are impurely imaginary". However, word on the grapevine is that, allowing for a little literary license, they were very autobiographical, and thus they are presented here as a valuable and amusing illumination into ways that pederasty was practised in the United States between 1946 and the latish 1970s, an era when it was repressed, but not yet hysterically so.
Puppies by John Valentine is a series of journal entries depicting the author's sexual encounters with boys of 12 to 19 in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly one-night stands in Los Angeles. Further insight is provided by a review of it by one of his boy-loves.
My Life as a Boy is a man's warm reminiscence, after thirty-seven years, of an affair he had initiated at eleven with a farmer, in 1970.
Getting It On. Rites of Passage: Homosexual Histories of Six Heterosexual American Boys is Dr. Joseph Winchester's lengthy interviews of six boys who had sexual experiences with both men and other boys, spanning a quarter of a century from the 1960s to the 1980s, none of them in large cities.
The Trucker and the Teens by Louis A. Colantuono is an imprisoned truck driver's frank and vivid account of his love affairs with many boys, some of whom lived with him, over the years 1969-75.
Learning How to Love by Peter Young is an unusual account of an intense Greek love affair in the 1970s to 1980s that lasted sexually from when the boy was six to at least nineteen.
John Mitzel's The Boston Sex Scandal is an exposé of the brutality against boys and general dishonesty deployed in an ultimately unsuccessful plot to concoct a huge man/boy sex scandal in December 1977. Though horrific, it was nothing compared with the horrors that were to ensue with the mass hysteria about child sex that was beginning to erupt at just that time.
Chicago to Cheyenne by Norris Irving is a brief and poignant account from 1993 of an encounter that would have promised badly-needed love in a less repressive age.
These Were My Realities, the prison journal of a sensitive social worker imprisoned during the first four years of the 21st century for mild sex with willing boys, is very evocative of the hysteria over Gree love that was by then in full swing.
Canada
Though independent of Great Britain from 1931, Canada followed, with slight delays, the same path of repression towards Greek love as the mother country, with a significant variation only in the late 20th century. Hence, the law against sodomy (meaning pedication in both countries and theoretically a capital offence until 1869) was broadened into prohibition of all male homosexuality in 1892, with willing boys over 14 also considered culpable.
The treatment of pederasty by the law in the most populous province of the country between 1890 and 1935 is the subject of 'Horrible Temptations': Sex, Men and Working-Class Male Youth in Urban Ontario" by Steven Maynard.[1] Shedding interesting light on the social and cultural conditions that gave rise to sex between men and boys, as a survey of all criminal proceedings there, it unsurprisingly includes everything from rape to long-lasting love affairs. In the few cases where boys complained of sex they had consented to, the cause was almost invariably having been cheated of a promised reward. Often they had to be forced to testify; in one remarkably case, a boy who had been beaten by his parents refused to succumb to threats made by the court that he would be punished if he did not.
The sexual revolution of the 1960s briefly ushered in sufficient sexual freedom to make Canada the only English-speaking land apart from the U.S. state of Hawaii where pederasty was ever quasi-legal,[2] with homosexuality legalised for boys over fourteen in 1969, though pedication was excepted and the age of consent was raised to sixteen in 2008.
[1] The Canadian Historical Review, Volume 78, No. 2, Toronto, June 1997, pp. 191-235.
[2] For absolute accuracy, this statement should be qualified by the observation that sex between men and boys may well have been allowed by the English themselves before their conversion to Christianity over the course of the 7th century. This can only be guessed at from the very little known about pederasty amongst the ancient Germanic tribes.
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