Here's the full quote.

THE POINT IS, I'm happy to have discovered someone else who is interested in tracking the process of DEVELOPING the BL vision from a self-centered sexual obsession to a community-minded, morally-bounded impulse to e.g., build YMCA's, etc. What's more, this Whitney Davis guy put a really nice quote on the back of DUL:

Davis on Defence of Uranian Love:

"Warren's masterwork is a historical explanation and cutural analysis of "Uranian Love," or pederastic homoeroticism, in the ancient and modern worlds; it is also a Utopian vision. For decades it has been familiar only to specialists who have been able to consult one of the rare copies; Warren's contribution to the historiography of same-sex love has been vastly underestimated. This superb edition will set the stage for its rediscovery in the twenty-fist century. In his emphasis on homosexual /ascesis,/ or the need to practice what might be called a "care of the self," a vigilant self-moderation of a man's erotic and moral responses to a younger lover, Warren prefigured such histoians as Kenneth Dover and Michel Foucault in understanding the norms of Greek pederasty in their own historical context. Read alongside such writings as Freud's and Gide's , Warren's book sheds fascinating light on the challenges of "Uranians" in the first part of the last century as they contemplate their past, their present, and the options for their future."


SO YEAH, Whitney Davis can speak plain language. But here he gets PHILOSOPHICAL about how the process of sublimation looked in Kant's day and in Kant's terms. (Sublimination = finding other things to do with your libido besides drool over boys, like maybe HELP OUT IN THE COMMUNITY)

"Strictly speaking, in fact, the psychosocial mechanism of the Kantian judgment of beauty should cleave individual expressions of interested desire, such as pederastically motivated appreciation of the youthful male body, from the accumulating palimpsest of a universalizing aesthetic judgment within the community. Many if not most or all interested judgments should turn out to be incompatible with an emergent normative (or disinterested) judgment (even though that universalized judgment must itself be discovered reotrodictively as the maximally dense overlay of accumulating individual judgments considered at some essentially arbitrary threshold of totalization). In an influential but obscure passage on the "Ideal of Beauty", Kant proposes to imagine one's cognitively palimpsested judgments on 'a thousand full-grown men' as he writes, 'in the space where they most come together, and within the contour where the place is illuminated by the greatest concentration of color ... is the stature of a beautiful man.' although conforming to his broader doctrine of the harmonization of faculties, Kant's jump from the mechanically average to the dynamically beautiful -- supposedly a single mind can average its own apprehensions - is not wholly perspicuous. Nor is the transition from the cognitive palimpsest of a single person' judgments of a thousand men to the social palimpsest of 'the intermediate between all singular intuitions of individuals with their manifold variations ' -- say, the average of a thousand different people's judgments of a single man. Finally, the social palimpsest of emergent disinterested judgment (the emergent sensus communis) produces a necessary but not a sufficient condition for beauty - namely, correctness or canonicity. To achieve the true 'idealization' of beauty (le beau ideal - the latter modifies the former term), supposedly the beauty of the emergent but essentially academic 'normal idea' must itself express the highest moral finalities -- strength, benevolence and so forth -- without permitting any 'sensuous charm' to mingle with the great interest, even the delight, we might justifiably take in objects exhibiting or representing such qualities. Implicitly, then, the Kantian mechanism requires that sensuous (erotic) interst and delight must be converted into non-sensuous (rational and moral) approbation and admiration; and it imagines that this conversion occurs as it were naturally in the social (or sociable) coordination of judgements. And thus, as Kant notes, the judgement of beauty idealized, le beau ideal, cannot just be 'a simple judgement of taste', such as David Hume had seen in the individual connoisseur refining his personal experience of the object. Logically it must embed a prior notion of an ideal man or of ideal manhood. And presumably this notion both depends on and invokes generalized social conceptions -- likely religious or legal-juridical -- of rational and/or moral identity."
(Davis, Whitney. "Homoerotic Art Collections From 1750-1920." page 5-6)

What's interesting here is the way old Platonic thoughts -- using the image of the beautiful boy to trap the young and thoughtless into serious moral discussions -- is now happening in Kant's philosophical world of "aesthetic idealism" and "erotic historicism."