{an essay first posted on another board, revised version}


I lived some years in a city that had a Metropolitan Community Church in it, the church denomination set up by gay men and lesbians at the beginning of gay liberation in the early 70’s. I regularly went to services and liked what I heard. They were by no means pro-boylover – quite the opposite – but this was one of those cases, I think, where they simply hadn’t yet seen how their own principles naturally extended in our direction. The fundamental truth of “God loves you as you are” applies to us too. The little essay below is a preliminary sketch of how I think this works. I’d be very interested in your reactions and responses, positive or negative.


A beautiful 12-year-old who decided to go his own way

The young boy grew and became strong and filled with wisdom. The favor of God was with him.

Every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the Passover celebration, and when he was twelve years old, they went up as they always did. After Passover, they left to go home, but the boy stayed behind in Jerusalem. They didn’t know it. Thinking that he was somewhere in the caravan, they travelled for a day and looked for him among relatives and friends. Not finding him, they went back to Jerusalem to see if he was there.

After three days of searching the streets they found him in the temple, sitting in the middle of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him found his understanding and his answers astonishing. When his parents saw him, they were amazed, and his mother said to him, "Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been worried sick and we were looking everywhere." He said to them, "Why were you looking for me? Didn’t you realize that I have to be in my father's house?" But they didn’t understand this at all.

He went back home with them to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart.

Jesus advanced in wisdom as he grew and found favor with God and the people around him.


Luke chapter 12, slightly paraphrased.


Some kids start to feel grown up a lot earlier than their parents expect.

The world never knows what to make of these precocious boys, who are ready to go about their lives and start to take up adult actions before their parents expect it. Yet the Jewish religion that this boy Yeshua (Jesus) grew up in makes all boys proclaim when they turn 13, “today, I become a man.” This is in the bar mitzvah ceremony (a tradition that began a little later than Jesus’ time). These 13-year-old new men are theoretically eligible under Jewish law to marry. That presumes, of course, that they are straight – but as in all human communities, not all of them are. Let it be noted, though, that 13 is the traditional “age of consent” (for marriage inclusive of sex) in the rather conservative mother-religion of Christianity and Islam.

What happens when these nascent adults are gay and, like boy Jesus, very independent-minded? In the Canadian city of Toronto, a prominent member of the gay community, bar owner George Hislop (now passed away, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hislop), became well known in the general community in several attempts to run for municipal office in the Toronto City Council. One story he repeatedly told in public was that he discovered, at the age of 14, that there was some action going on in the public men’s rooms in Toronto’s High Park that he was already very interested in. He hung around there and as he would say, “Eventually, I found that there were a few men there who could be persuaded to have sex with me. But the thing that amazed me and that I couldn’t understand at all is that none of them wanted to stay around afterward and be my friend!”

It seems that human society can’t stop itself from twisting and deforming the natural course of human relationships. In the 1970’s in northwestern Europe, a few doors began to open for precocious boys who spontaneously acted like men, and the few men who dared to love them. But, in later years, as a sort of retrenchment following the general decision that lesbians and gay men would be tolerated, people decided they would draw the line against boylovers. Sexual chaos and despoilment, the great social fear, was now going to be warded off by cracking down especially hard on intergenerational relations. Legal ages of consent started going up; legal photo magazines were closed down.

This trend was powered by the fact that some kids who had been involved in sex were not precocious, self-starting sexual-romantic explorers heading off to find the adult world, but instead were just ordinary kids taken sexual advantage of by adult exploiters. In the 1970’s and later, as young people now may or may not be fully aware, large numbers of people began to publish the pain of their unwanted or retrospectively rejected childhood sex experiences, and the topic of childhood sexual abuse became very popular with authors and movie-makers. People were horrified (and also addictively scandal-titillated) by all these stories of personality damage done by the invasion of bodily privacy. There was a reaction. All the yearning boys out there like George in Toronto were swept off the social scene as part of a massive lockup of the young. They were trapped inside the anti-abuse fortress. Boylovers were sent back to the journalistic dark ages and were once again represented as monsters. The public profile of boylovers was determined entirely by Jeffrey Dahmer-type psychopaths (though most of Jeffrey’s victims were over 20) and all the Roman Catholic priests and lay brothers who abused their authority by laying-on hands where hands were not wanted.

One other thing going on in the world at the same time, though, was that a mighty new gay-positive Christian church was arising in the Americas and parts of Europe and Africa. In most places it was represented by the Metropolitan Community Church but in some places there were other institutions. The revelation of this church was not just that same-sex relationships could be supported by good Christian thought, but also that genuine love was the same wherever it was found – you could not call it good in a heterosexual marriage but then call exactly the same set of caring mutual concerns wicked if the two partners happened to be same-sex. In Christian terms, if genuine love had to be disapproved of under certain conditions, then it became “a house divided against itself,” as the beautiful boy said when he became older. "Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand.” As soon as people started knocking gay love, they also forced hetero love to become a sort of militarized social duty, not real love at all. The worst thing was that lesbians and gay men often got married to opposite-sex partners and had to fake romantic love for their entire lives, or at least as long as they could stand it. As long as gay love was forbidden, hetero love was potentially a false mask.

Now, we all know that in sexual relationships anything can happen. Husbands can beat wives, wives can stab husbands, gay partners can sleep around unsafely and then quietly bring home deadly diseases, people can just be mean to one another. Is it all love, then? Clearly not: sexual relationships can be based partly or wholly on greed, power, contempt, and so on. But whether there is love or not does not depend on whether the relationship is gay or hetero.

No one ever chose the capacity to be gay, hetero or bi, and seeing that love could exist perfectly well in same-sex relationships, the gay-positive Christian movement declared that sexualities consistent with loving relationships were a gift from God. I am going to say that again: a gift from God. Keep in mind that this idea of love is the defining feature of Christianity: as Paul put it: “the entire law is summed up in a single command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

What about boylovers then? Do you love? Do we love? Do we have a special divine gift? Could we have a loving relationship that is real? Those of us inclined to love know we can, but it is hard to prove to a skeptical mind, isn’t it? And there are lots of those around. But wait: isn’t that the same trouble people have always had? Forget gay relationships a moment: even with inter-racial relationships, skeptics could always easily say that they were just some sick passion, contrary to everything in nature, doomed to grief and twisted offspring. Here is the basis of boylover-positive Christianity: God is not one of these skeptics. God knows a little more than that!

We don’t have to be skeptics to be realistic. Another fact about love is that it isn’t easy, half of marriages end in divorce. Beautiful boys and their beautiful men can have very different agendas and needs, and sometimes what begins as mutual boylove/manlove can end up as a tense relation between a demanding near-parent and a rebellious near-child. But actually, the fact that this can happen doesn’t say anything categorical against cross-generational relationships. It’s only logical that if failed and troubled adult hetero relationships don’t condemn the whole phenomenon, failed and troubled boy-man relationships don’t trash the better possibilities either. People who have ordinary generosity, sensitivity, and a little luck in finding and recognizing the right person can make things work And in Christianity, we believe that the holy spirit can help with some extra guidance. With some prayer and openness, through grace, we can set the wit of God to work in our own love story. Sometimes love just works. What was it that author Chris Isherwood said about his boyfriend Don Bachardy, 31 years younger than himself, who he met when he was 49 and Don was a very young looking 18? (See Don at circa 19 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Isherwood) “He is the ideal companion to whom you can reveal yourself totally and yet be loved for what you are, not what you pretend to be.” (memoir “Christopher and His Kind”, 1976). Isn’t that what our gift of love is looking for?

Dare we then join God in fully embracing our divine gift of love, hoping it will be directed right through thoughtfulness, grace and prayer?

Pray with me if you want to be part of this boy-hug of someone worthy of divine boy-love: yourself.

Beautiful boy Jesus, we know that you live in eternity. You are alive and, in the spirit, you are all of the ages you ever were. For us, especially, you are that 12-year-old boy who knew in his heart what he had to do and went right on to do it.

Boy Jesus, thanks so much for showing me the way of your astonishing love. I really never knew there could be love as pure as this, but I forgot you also have a boy’s heart. I hope I treat everyone with the respect and awe that I would treat you with, and with the grace that you are treating me with. And because of my special gifts, powers and needs, bring me the boy or boys who need me and let me do what is truly fitting and loving for them, truly wanted and life-giving for them. And if there is any special boy truly gifted by nature to love me without reservation or second thought, let us see each other, and when we do, let us build each other up together and embrace each other with all the power of your boy love. Help us to distinguish love and lust so no advantage is ever taken of a boy’s love. We know that on the last free night of your life you spent the whole Passover meal with the boy you loved, the blessed disciple, resting his head against your chest – how sweet it must have been in that dark time. Later, when the politicians were having you tortured, you gave the young man to your mother as a new son, and he cared for her for the rest of her days. Clearly, we are not strangers to one another – we share the same love. And like you we are not afraid to bring our love into action in this world that needs it so badly.