More young gay boy media *rant*

So I am bored and not in the mood but gay boys tube has a short films section. I ran into yet another thing from the 90's accurately reflecting young boys cruising - for anyone interested it is called 'The Story Of A Gay Teen' and is not pornographic but I do not know the title, but it's hosted on a porn site.

Anyway it is about a young school boy, about 5 mins in he goes into a public toilet and a note is passed to him under the stools by a man. This is what happened to me, to several boys just in my town in the UK alone. Of course this is now "grooming" since cottaging in public toilets has largely died out and its gone online.

But the thing I'm angry about is it was so prevalent that depictions of it were presented in many tv/film productions. In public toilets of the 90's there would be charts on the wall advertising for young boys, inviting them to leave age/day/time/likes of when they would be available. Anyone could see these, and we'd get our pens out and respond 12, 13, 14 and so on.

No moral panic. No police. No "protecting us from our own desires".

Well not at first, but eventually I took the note. Now I am here and awaiting charges for being a pervert.

The section of the film disturbed me. I was that boy. I remember that nervousness, fear, confusion, excitement. Heart nearly pounding out your chest. Shallow breath. Don't know what to do.

That was my boyhood. That's all I can say.

Found the film on you tube. This was my boyhood. Now I am here:

https://youtu.be/gnXvYJwC3vU

Interesting film. Note that his decision to engage in casual sex with a man he doesn't know and is deeply ambivalent about is because he isn't getting the nurturing he needs elsewhere in his life. Engaging in sex as a sexually aware youngster is not harmful in itself. It's the nature of the activity that counts - how you're treated, whether you're doing it to make up for some emotional lack, etc. Here the boy lacks paternal warmth and doesn't get it from his favourite teacher either, so he turns to a stranger. Pleasing, however, to see that the guy in the toilets was presented as a nice guy.

I had cold and sometimes violent parents. My father was a traditional patriarchal authority. When I came across that business I became depressed and withdrawn, had a couple of different teachers try to talk to me but I was too scared/ashamed to tell anyone. In the early 90's in a working class environment it was every bit as frightening to be gay as a paedophile.

I initially just watched men masturbating through the holes. I recall kicking the man's hand when he tried to pass me a note under the stools and leaving feeling angry and ashamed. You had to go back because there was nothing else.

The boy would have likely only been masturbated by the man. He wouldn't have gone straight to penetration. None of us did as far as I recall, with the boys I ran into it was mostly masturbation.

After a few months of desensitization you started doing things, if you had the misfortune to also be poor then you soon found yourself doing things for money. It's a myth that rent boys were groomed and put on drugs and stuff. Most the time we just fell into it.

How different it could have been if society had said love and lust between two human beings is fine, and the only thing that matters is how people treat each other. You were the eromenos, but in a culture in which such a relationship was seen as sordid and confined to toilet cubicles, and had none of the positive, edifying features such a relationship could have. Did guys write poetry to you? They would have in ancient Greece.

Of course not it was mostly ###$ and go. You rarely went with the same guy twice.

That business cost me everything. I have never recovered from the social and economic costs. Now I'm just a sad loser and loner whose whole youth was "child sexual abuse". Society won't even allow me the right to define my own experiences. I've got nothing, even my memories are forbidden.

I was crying watching that. It's even the same name. I'm so sorry that things were so backward back then.

cumulusjames wrote:Society won't even allow me the right to define my own experiences.

Society won't allow anyone the right to define their own experiences. Which is why you have to abandon the concept of rights and entitlement and just take control of them by saying 'f**k the lot of you, I won't let you dictate how I ought to feel'. Society is also dictating to those men how they should feel about their part. Some of them couldn't care less, I'm sure. Others may be in a pit of despair. They may have spent their childhoods being bombarded with messages that being gay was wrong, but spared the stigma now attached to finding 13-year-olds attractive. And now that homosexuality is generally more acceptable, they'll be subject to the discourse that insists, stridently, that finding 13-year-olds attractive is the ultimate sin. Life probably sucks for some of them too. What a terrible injustice society is inflicting on you. Best to abandon that concept (justice/injustice) too. Free yourself from the shackles of these sociocultural narratives. That's the path to recovery.

This is something that most people don't understand - the men who went with me most probably no more knew it was wrong than I did. Because homosexuality was driven into the darkspace they are would have had no reference point to what's "age appropriate". Neither did I.

Exactly. So not really any point in worrying about it. If society weren't telling you to feel bad about this it'd be telling you to feel bad about some other aspect of your identity or experiences.