Chapter 6: Greek Love, His and Hers (1962–1964)
“It used to be the love that dare not speak its name
and now it’s the love that won’t shut the f*** up.”
—Bette Midler
My mother and father had begun a longstanding professional collaboration of the sort that many writers could only dream of: In 1964, my father published his book Greek Love under the pseudonym “J. Z. Eglinton” and dedicated it to “My beloved wife.” In 1965, my mother published her companion article “Feminine Equivalents of Greek Love in Modern Fiction” in my father’s short-lived International Journal of Greek Love. I am including full copies of a review of Greek Love by one of my father’s contemporaries, my own thoughts on a brief excerpt from my mother’s article, and excerpts from a few pro-pedophile writers so you can see the commonalities between them.
My mother’s ideas are as repulsive as my father’s. However, they shed light on her own conduct and her pervasive defense of my father. In case anyone doubts my mother’s participation in my father’s book, this is from her court testimony in 1999:
MZB: He wrote a book called “Greek Love” under the name of John Eglington.
MR. DOLAN: And you reviewed some of the manuscripts of that book before it was published?
MZB: Yes, I did.
MR. DOLAN: And did you contribute by doing proofreading?
MZB: I did proofreading, yes.
MR. DOLAN: Did you do some editorial work on that book?
MZB: I attempted to, but I found out afterward that everything I had done had been thrown out by the publisher, Robert Bashno [sic].
Robert Bashlow, not Bashno, is one of the Superkids referenced in Chapter 2.
Greek Love was a treatise on the history of homosexuality and pederasty. It strongly criticized the “adultification” of homosexuality and maintained that historically, homosexual relationships have always been between an adult and a much younger boy. It even asserted that sexual contact with children would somehow prevent juvenile delinquency.
Advocacy for pedophilia is not nearly as rare as it should be. There are a dismaying number of pro-pedophile gay and lesbian societies. Wikipedia lists about fifty, though many are defunct, and I hope many more will be defunct soon. The most famous of these in the USA is NAMBLA, which featured the infamous slogan: “Sex before eight, or it’s too late.”
Pedophilia is wrongly categorized by proponents as the “emancipation” of children. Many gay activists support pedophilia by claiming that the children have “rights” to have sex and that the “rights” of adults to have sex with them is simply a natural extension of sexual freedom. Put another way, as my mother said it, “Children have the right to have sex” and “Children are brainwashed into believing they do not want sex.”
I have included this article about my father to illustrate that the issue of homosexuality is inextricably linked with pederasty and pedophilia according to its own supporters. It is an unpopular public topic in the gay community because its implications are more likely to result in routine denouncement of all homosexual activity than in widespread acceptance of sex with children. The requirement within the community is to keep the intergenerational aspects hidden from straights until the world is “ready” to accept this “freedom.”
Walter H. Breen (J. Z. Eglinton) (1928–1993) by Donald Mader, from Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context, Vern Bullough, 2002
“Rev. Donald H. Mader (1948- ) is a photographer, publisher and boylove activist, currently working as an assistant pastor. Mader is one of the founders of Paidika (Journal of Paedophilia.)”
“Recent scholarship has emphasized homosexualities rather than simply the term homosexual. It is startling to note that, although coming from a very specific point of view, one of the pioneering studies by an American, “Greek Love” anticipated this by at least thirty years. Walter Henry Breen (also known by his pseudonym J. Z. Eglinton) was the most important theorist of man-boy love…
Pederasty is presented as a legitimate form of homosexuality instead of a violent crime which results in physical injury and never-ending emotional consequences. Furthermore, my father is lauded as a scholar rather than called a criminal.
…Breen independently affirmed, as they had, the distinction between what he termed “Greek love” (pederasty, or intergenerational homosexual relationships) and “androphile homosexuality” (eroticism between adult males). Although he himself argued that androphile homosexuality had usurped the “true” tradition of homosexuality which belonged to Greek love, viewed in a critical perspective this renewed insight opened the way in the United States for an understanding of homosexual behavior as a protean rather than a unitary phenomenon. …
Pederasty is the most authentic form of homosexuality. Adult-adult homosexuality is a modern invention. This amounts to an attempt to sanitize criminal conduct.
…It is one of his specialized books, Dies and Coinage, published in 1962 by Robert Bashlow, which provides a link to our topic here. Breen and Bashlow shared more interests than numismatics: both had an erotic interest in younger males. A wealthy coin and bullion dealer who had already created one press for numismatic publications, Bashlow was persuaded to fund another press for issuing material on “sexual questions.” Called the Oliver Layton Press, its first book was Greek Love (1964) by Breen, who for it adopted the pseudonym created for him by Bashlow, by which he was to be known in homosexual circles, J. Z. Eglinton. …
Robert Bashlow was one of my father’s research subjects, or Superkids, at Columbia University. He became the publisher for Greek Love, no doubt introjecting his abuser and becoming the pedophile who initiated him.
…It is not, however, his personal eccentricities, but his book Greek Love for which Breen deserves notice. The 500 page volume is divided into two almost equal parts: the first is a theoretical discussion and justification for man-boy homosexual relationships; the second is a survey of the cultural history of such relationships. …
Crimes against children are the subject of rhapsodical admiration, and there is no concern for the victims whatsoever.
… Breen is claiming for his Greek love, which he defines as the relation between an adult man and a younger boy (generally between ages twelve and seventeen) in which neither is exclusively homosexual—for only a man with heterosexual experience could guide the boy to a heterosexual outcome, which is the goal of Greek love. The man supplies a role model and the love (unconditional positive regard) which enables the boy’s personality to develop healthily, performs a pedagogical function by teaching specific skills, and generally initiating the boy into the adult world and its complexities and responsibilities (including preparing him for eventual heterosexual relations), and within this framework shares sexual or erotic experiences with the boy, who will then apply this experience in heterosexual practice. In return, the man accepts the boy’s love and admiration, and attains sexual satisfaction from their shared experience. …
The utter hubris of deciding that sex is a suitable exchange for adult male mentoring is absurd. The willingness of the author to discuss it in such glowing terms makes one wonder what he has done and to whom. Place this firmly against the backdrop of one of my father’s victims, screaming in agony, against this long-winded description of “love.”
… The major problem, he still maintains, is that these relationships are illegal; society should understand them, tolerate them, give them room to develop and flourish, and judge each relationship by its result…
The result, of course, is physical and emotional trauma. By all means, judge these “relationships” by the misery they produce.
FEMININE EQUIVALENTS OF GREEK LOVE IN MODERN FICTION
(International Journal of Greek Love, Vol.1 No. 1, 1965, Page 48)
MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY San Francisco
“ABSTRACT: Exact counterparts to male Greek love relationships are more frequently encountered in lesbian literature than in male h
omosexual literature from the Victorian epoch to date. … Tragic denouements in such fiction, when found at all, arise either when the older woman fears and rejects such attachments or when outsiders misunderstand them and forcibly break up the affairs, even as in actual case histories in both genders.
Mother argues that the reason that sexual relationships between girls and women are invariably disastrous is that they are interrupted and stigmatized by “society,” and she believes that these relationships should be allowed to continue.
“There are exceptions, but in general the pattern of Greek love between woman and girl is one of emotion rather than sensuality, involving heroine-worship, admiration, emulation.” “…They usually occur between a maturing girl—somewhere between nine and sixteen—and a woman of mature years. Motherless girls, or those with inadequate maternal attention and support, appear to feel the greatest need for these attachments, usually from a lack of understanding or tenderness in their lives…”
Tragedy results when a motherless child seeks love from an adult and becomes her sexual victim.
“The relationship is usually as good—or as bad—as the women with whom the girl is lucky or unlucky enough to fall in love… Tragedy, however, seems not to be inherent in such a relationship (unless… the woman is herself corrupt), but occurs only when (1) the relationship is misunderstood and interrupted by outsiders, or (2) the older woman fears or rejects such an attachment.”
I disagree wholeheartedly with my mother’s conclusions. It is self-serving, vile, and corrupt in the extreme to use vulnerable children as sexual partners. It is criminal to misconstrue a child’s tolerance or participation as anything other than the things children will tolerate for any semblance whatsoever of maternal love.
These “relationships” are neither motherhood, which is selfless and helps a child grow into independence, nor romantic love, which is meant to grow into a permanent bond. They twist the girl away from normal adulthood and into protracted emotional dependence.
Only in keeping the relationships non-sexual is there even a chance of creating the healing of the mother-wound which is so clearly illustrated in each of my mother’s examples. Sexualizing even a substitute mother-child relationship puts intolerable adult emotional demands on a child, and sublimate all the needs of the child to the desires of the adult. Just ask the victims twenty to forty years later when they can talk about what happened.
Beth Kelly: Speaking Out on “Women/Girl Love”—Or, Lesbians Do “Do It” (pp.86–89)
This is an example of a former child-victim who introjected her abuser and became the pedophile who sexualized her. The title alone is horrifying.
Beth Kelly, now mature in years, and a radical lesbian feminist, who, as a “precocious” eight year old, developed a relationship with a grown woman? She writes:
"The first woman I ever loved sexually was my great-aunt; our feelings for each other were deep, strong, and full. The fact that she was more than fifty years older than I did not affect the bond that grew between us. And, yes, I knew what I was doing—every step of the way—even though I had not, at the time, learned many of the words with which to speak of these things.
An adult relative is willing to exploit her much younger niece, who needed the attention enough to tolerate, even welcome, the destruction of her sexual boundaries. Judging by my mother’s essay, it is most likely another case of a motherless girl needing love from an older woman and being led to “pay for it” in a predictable way.
Aunt Addie was a dynamic, intelligent, and creative woman who refused, all her life, to be cowed by convention. In an extended family where women played out ’“traditional” housewifely roles to the hilt, she stood out a beacon of independence and strength. She was a nurse in France during the First World War, had traveled, read books, and lived for over twenty years in a monogamous relationship with another woman.
How is it that the author’s aunt did not find an age-appropriate partner to replace her former one? How could she seamlessly shift between a relationship with an adult and with her eight-year-old niece, who was more than fifty years younger? Are we meant to conclude that for lesbian women, incestuous intergenerational relationships are normal and desirable?
Her lover’s death pre-dated the start of our sexual relationship by about two years. But we had always been close and seen a great deal of each other. In the summers, which my mother, brother, and I always spent at her seashore home, we were together daily. In other seasons, she would drive to visit us wherever we were living and often stayed for a month or so at a time.
Aunt Addie used a small girl to replace the adult lover she had lost.
I adored her; that’s all there was to it. I had never been taught at home that heterosexual acts or other body functions were dirty or forbidden, and I’d been isolated enough from other children to manage to miss a lot of the usual sexist socialisation learned in play.
The issue is not the “dirtiness” or “forbidden-ness” of such a liaison or the sexual acts associated with it. The issue is in the emotional results for the child. As noted elsewhere, early experience is the best way to predict later experiences. A girl who might have looked forward to a marriage and family is now locked into a system where her entire relational life will depend on seducing young girls, in invariably time-limited, temporary, and exploitative relationships. There will never be an adult relationship resulting from such a perversion of normal affections. As to the “sexist socialisation” she claimed is learned in play, are we to conclude that she thinks all hetero relationships are sexist?
“It never occurred to me that it might be considered ‘unnatural’ or ‘antisocial’ to kiss or touch or hold the person I loved, and I don’t think that Addie was terribly concerned by such things either. I do know that I never felt pressured or forced by any sexual aspects of the love I felt for her. I think I can safely say, some twenty years later, that I was never exploited physically emotionally, or intellectually - in the least.”
Yes, the author has never felt exploited, and because of her “relationship,” she sees nothing wrong with exploiting other children.
“As so often happens, this joyous liaison eventually foundered on the rocks of parental disapproval, when Beth’s mother chanced upon her and Addie in bed together. But disapproval of paedophilia or, rather, disapproval of child sexuality, has a significance far beyond its disastrous impact on the lives of the relatively limited numbers of children and adults in paedophilic relationships.”
The disapproval is not the problem. The disapproval exists because of the predatory nature of these relationships, and because of the natural wish of parents to prevent their children from being sexualized, used, and heartbroken by predatory adults. After all, how can you sit down for Sunday dinner with your aunt if she has been teaching you unsavory practices after midnight and has broken up with you to sexually abuse your little sister? The way to make sure there are no unsavory practices and no breakups is to keep people, especially relatives, out of the beds of children.
“The impact of the sex-negative outlook has to be seen in a wider societal context in order to appreciate its full significance.”
Being sex-positive means approving of pedophilia?
The Kanalratten Commune, Berlin: There Can Be No Emancipation of Women Without the Emancipation of Children: The Kanalratten Manifesto (pp.90–93) By Kanalratten
(Kanalratten means canal rats, or sewer rats, in German slang)
“We define female paedophilia as love between girls and adult women which is voluntary and includes sexual satisfaction; it is not a form of domination over other people since it is a form of life in which we have no need to dominate or possess children.”
An ironic statement since sexual abuse of children invariably results from domination and possession. We, as children, are not free to refuse or to oppose adult wishes, even evil ones.
“We wish to live without power over children and without the lifeless sexuality of adults. Adult s
exuality means the destruction of life and the environment. The destruction of the environment precedes the destruction of child sexuality.”
So adult-adult relationships are “lifeless,” and anti-environmental.
“Relationships with children other than those in the permitted categories of family, upbringing, home, and education are either not allowed or criminalized. Any attempt to break out of this machine of death is prevented.”
The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon Page 8
