PARALLEL LIVES
BY PETER BURTON

Peter William Burton (29 April 1945 - 7 November 2011) was an English writer, principally as a journalist for the earliest homosexual magazines to come out after the legalisation of sex between men in England in 1967. His first memoir, Parallel Lives, was published by GMP Publishers in London in 1985. Presented here are the passages in it of Greek love interest, as though Burton had no apparent erotic interest in boys himself, he knew well others who did, besides having experienced men with such interest in him whe he was a boy.

Chapter 1
Setting the Scene

On himself as a schoolboy, apparently aged thirteen to fifteen:

And something obviously felt right about me to others. I must have exuded — albeit unconsciously — some kind of powerful homosexual signal. There was the English teacher at school, who offered to give me extra tuition, but in reality was more keen to get his hands in my knickers. There was the old man who touched me up in the cinema during a showing of The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. That was profoundly traumatic — though for less than usual reasons. I enjoyed the sensations he was provoking in my body, I was deeply unhappy because he was so unappealing. I complained to the cinema manager and the man was ejected. Even at that stage I knew better than to involve the police. But I went home deeply distressed — and it was years before I could watch Ingrid Bergman’s impersonation of Gladys Aylward without squirming. There was the attractive youth who drove an ice-cream van — always keen to read me stimulating passages from the green-backed Olympia Press novels. The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe is one title I particularly remember There were a few older brothers of classmates. Sometimes men I encountered on my Saturday morning milk-round were decidedly familiar.

And I revelled in it. Already I saw that sex could equal power — and so far as the teacher was concerned, I used that power. Poor bloke, he obviously knew he was playing with fire. And he must have been terrified that I’d one day spill the beans. Of course, I never did. By the time I’d reached fifteen, I was in his class. I knew I had a hold over him, and if I didn’t feel inclined to turn up at school — well, I just didn’t bother.

I regularly bunked off on Friday afternoons — usually to go to the pictures with a friend. Nothing was ever said about my absences — though occasionally I was asked what the film had been like!

But the advantages I possessed were all based on a rough-and-ready intelligence and my blossoming sexual nature. […] 

On how things were when he left school in 1960, aged fifteen:

However, by this stage of the game I had started to meet and go to bed with other men. Initially most of these had been met — encountered would be a better description — on the train on my way home.

This led to problems. At fifteen or sixteen I looked about twelve and though by now fully sexually aware, my partners were extremely dubious about being seen with me — let alone taking me home with them. I quickly learned to lie about my age — adding on two or three years which I thought would make me seem less of a risk. But even if I did manage to persuade a pick-up to take me home with him, they still flatly refused to take me into a bar or a club.

Sometimes in the evenings after I finished work, I haunted the West End, hanging around Trafalgar Square in the hope that some man would chat me up and ask me to go for a drink with him before whisking me off for sex. I certainly got chatted up, I certainly got whisked off for sex — but I didn’t get invited for a drink in any of those almost mythical places which had by now become as important to me as a glass of water to a parched man staggering across a desert landscape.

Those early sexual experiences were generally highly unsatisfac-tory. Most of them took place anywhere but in a bed — I'd find myself fumbling and groping in dark back alleys (having the homosexual equivalent of the heterosexual ‘knee-trembler’), in parks (with which London is thankfully blessed), in shop doorways, in toilets, once in a coal! cellar. On one occasion someone picked me up and took me back to a flat just off Oxford Street. He was much older than me - though every bit as nervous. I suppose he must have thought I was straight(ish) rent; it’s hard to think of any other reason for his suddenly producing a pile of heterosexual porn magazines with which to arouse me.

Because I was young — very much a cute ‘chicken’ — and markedly effeminate, my partners only wanted to fuck me. About this, I was less than enthusiastic — though I always submitted with a modicum of good grace.

I now know that my effeminate appearance was a kind of fancy dress adopted as a signal to let others know I was gay and available. Because I didn’t yet know where to go to meet others like me, the only means I had of making contact was by making myself screamingly obvious. In fact, the look and the behaviour probably put off as many men as it attracted. But what I looked and acted like had very little to do with specific sexual desires.

Chapter 2
Clubland

Here is what Burton wrote for Spartacus magazine in 1968/9, describing a typical scene he had witnessed of a boy of fifteen paying his habitual Saturday evening visit to a Soho club (pp. 36-7):

Fifteen year old Johnnie, who’s been hopping in and out of bed Clubland with other men since he was thirteen,

Chapter 3
Lions and Shadows

On what ensued when in July 1968 Burton interviewed a young playwright, Colin Spencer, about his second play:

The interview and subsequent review of Spitting Image were the basis of a friendship that has lasted ever since. It was also due to Colin that I met writers like Michael Davidson, Gerald Hamilton and — most notably — Robin Maugham.

*

It was December 20th, 1971 — christened by Robin Maugham ‘Saint Davidson’s Day’. I was standing in Ibiza airport with Robin awaiting the arrival of Michael Davidson from the Italian island on which he then lived.^[1] Michael was coming to stay for Christmas — along with other friends who were flying in from London. Half Michael’s fare and expenses had been paid by Robin, I had chipped in with the other half. It is worth noting here that Michael Davidson was one of those lucky mortals who could manage perfectly well without any money at all. There were always loyal friends willing to help out when such funds as he did possess ran low.

Eventually Michael’s aeroplane landed. Michael, looking very old and frail, tottered across the tarmac, walking with the aid of a stick and with his right arm in a sling.. After we had collected his meagre luggage, we piled into Robin’s battered but sensible Renault and started the drive across the island to the villa which Robin then owned in the town of Santa Eulaia del Rio. Michael was full of woe. He told us of the gale which had ravaged his island a few days previously. The wind had picked him up and dashed him hard against the ground. Thus the arm in the sling. Later the local doctor confirmed that he had a fracture.

But fracture or not, Michael wasn’t going to be depressed for long. He was intent on enjoying his Christmas with old and new friends: at this point in time he had known Robin for nearly twenty-five years. White and red thoughts soon began to flow. When Michael would say to me, “Dear, nice Peter, I am having a little red thought,” I knew he was after yet another large glass of red wine.

I knew Michael Davidson fairly well for the last seven years of his life — he died on the island of Gozo, off Malta, on November 19th, 1975. I cannot claim to have been a close friend — but I was far more than an acquaintance. For Michael and I argued, fell out, made up again — and it is only with people one is really fond of that one takes and makes such efforts.

I well remember a testy letter Michael sent to Robin Maugham about me; ‘I do believe that Peter Burton has gone mad,’ he wrote. ‘l went round for dinner with him the other evening and he wasn’t even home. He arrived after about a half an hour. Obviously drunk — back from some pop festival or other. He claimed that he had tried to contact me to cancel dinner. If he did so, no message reached me. But dinner was off. He announced that he was going to America in a few days time. The first I’ve heard of it. With some pop group. Later I heard from C-^[2] that Peter has kidnapped his nephew and taken him to America with him. Have you any idea what is going on?’

Those may not be Michael’s exact words — but the sense is near enough. Yet again, we were not speaking.

I see from a letter dated May 22nd, 1973, that Michael and I were yet again on sticky terms. Yet — as always — we were communicating: ‘My dear Peter,’ he writes, ‘Let’s forget we’re not on speaking terms — at least while I tell you a fraction of what I feel about your marvellous review in Time Out.’ The review Michael refers to was of the reprint of his autobiography The World, the Flesh and Myself.

It was through this book that I first heard of Michael Davidson.

‘This is the life-history of a lover of boys,’ begins World, Flesh. ‘It’s a first-hand report, therefore, on that heresy which, in England especially, is reprobated above all others.’ A sensational opening — even in these days — for the autobiography of a ‘paederast’ or ‘paidophile’ (I use Michael’s spellings). But World, Flesh first appeared in 1962 - long before Cuthbert Worsley’s confessions, even longer before those of Maugham, Williams or Isherwood. ’

I first encountered the book on the jumbled shelves of a friend, somewhere around early 1966. J found it rather dull reading. My second attempt to read it — about eighteen months later — was at the prompting of Colin Spencer. Colin knew Michael well. He had, in fact, painted several portraits of him — one of which appeared as the frontispiece to the first edition of World, Flesh. “Have you ever read this?” Colin asked me, picking up a copy from the clutter of books in the work-room of the house in which he then lived. “I’ve tried,” I said, “but found it very heavy going.” Colin suggested I try again. I did and, much to my surprise, found it this time a fascinating — and important — autobiography.

Throughout his life Michael Davidson was a boy-lover. He was twice charged with offences arising out of his appetites, and once imprisoned. Various fields of employment — some connected with government — were closed to him after the nature of his sexuality was discovered.

Journalism, however, was one field which always remained open to Michael. He was in Berlin from 1928 until 1933, when, as a member of the German Communist Party, he had to flee the country. He was in North Africa for a time during the Second World War, and was imprisoned as a spy. On his release, he had only the clothes he stood up in — which were traditionally Arab. Michael arrived back in England and made his way to the Daily Express building in Fleet Street to file his story, still dressed like a Moroccan peasant.

Michael was in Malaya at the time of the struggle for independence, in Cyprus, Korea and in Vietnam. He was an inveterate traveller — and a great lover of boys of all nations, as World, Flesh and his second (and last) book, Some Boys, both show.

One of the other guests that Christmas of 1971 was a very strange young man — an East End, vegetarian, Maoist paidophile with whom at that time I was obsessively — and unfortunately — in love. As author of a classic autobiography on boy-love, Michael was a kind of hero to him. But he was to be sadly disappointed. For in conversation, he found that Michael was not a rapacious sex-fiend — lusting after boys all and sundry. To his surprise Michael didn’t even want to fuck his boys.

I can remember one conversation in particular — on Christmas Eve. My friend was pumping Michael — his senior by fifty years — about his sex life. “Did you fuck your boys?” he asked. Michael had another red thought. As I handed him his glass of red wine, he replied.

“No,” he said. “I have never wanted to have the boys with whom I have been in love. And I may say, in all honesty, I have only fucked twice in my life — and both times it was because the boys I was with asked me to do it to them.”^[3]

When Michael spoke of boys, incidentally, he didn’t mean little boys, as he was at great pains to point out to me in the letter quoted above, in which he defined the term paederast. ‘You won't mind my pointing out two small misconceptions,’ he wrote. ‘The most important is the assertion that a paederast goes for boys “usually just under or reaching pubescence”. The fact is, I think, that most boy-lovers are attracted by adolescence - and the Greeks, who invented the word paederast (the word pais means boy rather than child), certainly went in mainly for 13-17 year olds. Unfortunately, the implication here in the context of your review is that I spent a lifetime chasing pre-pubic boys — whereas in all my life I’ve never had anything to do with — nor wanted to — anybody who hadn’t at least reached puberty, and most of them even over 14 or 15.’

It was through Colin Spencer that I first encountered Michael; and it was via Michael that I met Gerald Hamilton — the model for Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris. I cannot quite remember, but I feel it was also Michael who first introduced me to Robin Maugham. Certainly we all met up in the pages of Jeremy which I was then editing — following in the footsteps of someone who preferred to edit the magazine pseudonymously. (He has since found fame and fortune as a biographer of the Queen.)

Michael was to write for Jeremy a short story which I commis-sioned called ‘Atti Innominabili’. And how difficult I was to find Michael as a contributor — for he wanted proofs promptly, payment even quicker, and finally set his agent on to me demanding payment virtually immediately on delivery of the manuscript. But ‘Atti Innominabili’ was a good short story. (Michael received the highest fee that I ever paid to a Jeremy contributor.) And though we had argued about the story before publication — I had had to have it completely reset - Michael was very happy with it when it finally appeared in the first issue over which I had control.

Yet Michael didn’t quite approve of my working for a gay magazine — two, in fact, as I was also contributing to Spartacus. Not only was I closely associated with the gay media, such as it was, but I also undertook press interviews and speaking engage-ments. I think the final straw for Michael was when I told him I had been asked to appear on a Granada television programme about gay people (a programme which, incidentally, was never made). “My dear Peter,” Michael said to me, “I do wish you wouldn't do it. I rather fear that you are becoming to homosexuals what Peter Scott is to wild birds.”

And that was one of the nicest things about Michael — for whatever terms one was on with him, he remained concerned. ‘All good wishes for your new American trip,’ he wrote to me on one occasion. ‘Though I deplore your defection to the pop world: your reviewing is always so intelligent and so readable that it’s a pity the gift should be vaporised in publicity. But money of course is attractive — and the main thing is that you should be happy, as I hope you are.’

As a writer, Michael was increasingly lazy. It is astonishing that someone who lived to seventy-eight should have produced only two books — one of which, Some Boys, in its British edition, was flawed by bad printing, ill-proofing and the censorship of the printer. Yet it wasn’t just laziness. Michael was a perfectionist. He wanted every sentence to be perfect, every word to be exactly right. In many ways, he achieved his high aims with The World, the Flesh and Myself. He certainly didn’t with Some Boys — though even with this he far excelled the purposes originally set for the book. For Some Boys had been commissioned by an American publisher who specialised in paidophile literature of a grossly explicit kind. (The American edition, printed in Taiwan, is the only complete text to have appeared.) It was beyond Michael to churn out quick masturbatory fantasies. Some Boys is a finely wrought addendum to The World, the Flesh and Myself, nicely erotic — but written with all the concern of someone who cares for the craft of a writer. Because the English edition of the book was so abortionate, Michael diligently typed out the most befouled pages — and whole sections had actually been arbitrarily cut by the censorious printer — and carefully pasted them into the copies of the book he was sending to friends. He could not bear these friends to think that perhaps he had been seduced by mammon into writing sloppily.

Towards the end of his life Michael moved to the island of Gozo and I rather lost touch with him — amongst other reasons because, for lengthy periods of time, I was in America. But if Michael and I were in London at the same time we would meet for glasses of red wine — most usually shared with Robin Maugham.

It was perhaps inevitable that I should have heard of Michael’s death whilst with Robin. Colin Spencer, Michael’s literary executor, called Robin as he, I and a close friend of Robin’s were enjoying Borgia-sized vodka tonics. I had just arrived back from a protracted stay in New York. Robin had, I seem to remember, returned from somewhere like Sri Lanka^[4] — or maybe he was just off somewhere. I know we hadn’t seen each other for more than a year. Suddenly the dreary, wet London afternoon became far duller. We had more drinks to cheer us up — and sat and remembered Michael — an affectionate, difficult, fascinating companion who produced a classic of contemporary autobiography.

Pp. 68 to 95 is an account of “Robin — more properly Robert Cecil Romer Maugham, 2nd Viscount Maugham of Hartfield”, for whom the author worked for many years, and of their friendship. Though vivid, highly entertaining and revealing in some aspects, it contrives to obscure Mauham’s pederasty^[5] as “gay” and certainly says nothing about his attraction to teenage boys that is not set out more clearly in Maugham’s own writings. Hence all that will be mentioned here are some points or quotes of special Greek love interest:

Pp. 79-81 of it is an interesting sketch of the playwright Joe Orton, whose sexual tastes were similar to Maugham, but are not mentioned by Burton.

On pp. 82-3, Davidson is mentioned again, but not with respect to Greek love. Burton had told him about his unhappy trip to Morocco with Maugham in September 1970, which had included sex he had not really wanted. Davidson told Maugham, which resulted in Maugham having a frank discussion with Burton and their relationship beginning a new and happier stage.

P. 84: On an evening in 1971 Burton spent on the Spanish island of Ibiza in the company of Maugham and actor Sal Mineo, involved in a projected film version of Maugham’s Greek love novel The Wrong People:

I rather remember that we were also on a humpy number hunt for Sal who, in the event, made do with one of the more amiable and willing British youths whose income was supplemented by some of the visitors to Robin’s villa.^[6]

P. 88: On what happened when Maugham’s novel about General Gordon, with which Burton had been helping, was delivered to his publisher, Heinemann:

When the manuscript of The Last Encounter was delivered they were frankly bored by Robin’s constant use of homosexuality in his novels. Before they would even consider publishing the novel they insisted that a long sequence be deleted from the book. This section of The Last Encounter chronicled a boy soldier’s love for one of his army fellows and included a lively sequence set in a child brothel. Annoyed by the request, Robin nevertheless removed the section. But Heinemann still weren’t happy. Now the book was too short. Could Robin rewrite it? The answer to that was a resounding No! Eric Glass — Robin’s agent — was instructed to find a new publisher. Eventually The Last Encounter was published by W. H. Allen; the excised chapter, somewhat revised, was published in a limited edition under the title Testament: Cairo 1898.

The third stage of my relationship with Robin essentially took place out of England. These were the years when I was summoned to Ibiza to help with what Robin always acknowledged as ‘the preparation and the writing’ of a book. In this way I assisted Robin with The Last Encounter, Escape From the Shadows, with revisions and rewrites on The Barrier, Lovers in Exile, The Dividing Line and Search for Nirvana.^[7] It was during this period that I collected together Robin’s short stories and edited and introduced them in a volume called The Black Tent.

^[1] The tiny island of Favignana off Sicily, where Davidson (1897-1975) had settled in January 1966, simultaneous to falling in love for the last time with the 15-year-old son of the local butcher. See Sicilian Vespers and other writings by Michael Davidson, edited with notes and a brief biography by Edmund Marlowe, London: Arcadian Dreams, 2021.

^[2] C. was perhaps Davidson’s close friend Colin Spencer (1933-2023), who introduced Burton to Maugham.

^[3] This is in contradiction to his claim in his memoir Some Boys (1969) that “I wasn’t capable of buggery” (p. 28 of the Arcadian Dreams edition, London, 2022), which was perhaps influenced by his annoyance with the popular assumption that it was what sex between men and boys was about.

^[4] Burton’s memory here is fuzzy. Letters in the Michael Davidson Archive held in 2024 by Edmund Marlowe make it clear that Maugham spent at least a month in Gozo beginning before Davidson’s final hospitalisation there in September 1975. See Sicilian Vespers and other writings by Michael Davidson, edited with notes and a brief biography by Edmund Marlowe, London: Arcadian Dreams, 2021.

^[5] Maugham was one of those for whom the word “pederast” would fit perfectly if it can include a middle-aged man’s attraction to men in their early and mid-twenties as well as teens.

^[6] Whether or not the youth was of an age to justify presenting this anecdote as being of Greek love interest is unknown. The serious suspicion that he was is based on the 32-year-old actor’s taste for unquestionable boys (ie. 14-year-olds) described in Michael Gregg Michaud’s Sal Mineo: A Biography, New York: Crown Archetype, 2010.

^[7] Of these, Escape From the Shadows and the franker Search for Nirvana were memoirs, from which the pederastic episodes have been extracted on this website.