The Michael Davidson advent calendar begins tomorrow!

November 30th, 2011, 13:54 | No comments

Dear readers, don’t miss the Michael Davidson feuilleton that will run here on the Destroyer blog as an advent calendar from 1st to 24th of December 2011. Each day there will be a new quote from his autobiography The World, the Flesh and Myself – available at Amazon from 3 dollars!

This is a book that matters – hopefully to you. That’s why I’ve chosen it for Destroyer’s first Advent Calendar.

Starting tomorrow at 6 AM Central European Time – enjoy!

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson

Destroyer presents the Advent Calendar 2011: Michael Davidson!

November 27th, 2011, 8:00 | No comments

This is Michael Davidson (1897 – 1976), as portrayed by Colin Spencer. The portrait is printed on a glossy paper inset in the first edition of Davidson’s autobiography The World, the Flesh and Myself from 1962, published by Arthur Barker Limited in London.

This book is extraordinary in many respects. Not least because Davidson travelled the world as a foreign correspondent and reported from more than a handful war zones and other places of historical importance – including the creation of the Third Reich, which he had to flee. He also associated with a number of famous people, and while many of them were more famous then than now, Davidson was the one who discovered, mentored and first published W. H. Auden. They met when Auden was 16 and Davidson 26.

However, the most interesting part of Michael Davidson’s life to readers of this blog is what he reveals in the first sentence of his book:

This is the life-history of a lover of boys.

That sentence plays an important part in his book, and that’s why I have chosen The World, the Flesh and Myself for Destroyer’s Advent Calendar 2011! Each day from the 1st to the 24th of December, there will be a post with a quote from this book. Because it deserves to be discovered by more people, and especially by the aesthetes who read this blog.

The rules are as follows:

I will make one change to the quotes I publish: line breaks. This is to ease the reading of the otherwise sometimes very long paragraphs. Davidson wrote the book in a time where attention spans were longer and there was no web. Look upon my line breaks as my interpretation of Davidson’s text – if I read it on a stage, this is where I would make a short break and take a breath before continuing.
I will highlight text here and there in bold type. For the same reasons as above – to ease reading and add emphasis.
There will be pictures of boys accompanying some of the calendar entries. Those are random boys that don’t have anything to do with Michael Davidson, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.

By the way, never mind the Christian traditions of Christmas and Advent – we’re just having a bit fun here! Bring back that feeling from childhood when you had a real Advent Calendar (or didn’t you?).

There is a Wikipedia entry on Michael Davidson, but it’s a so called stub. I encourage the readers of this blog to improve it and rate it, especially if you have information about Michael Davidson – I know I have some very knowledgeable readers.

Michael Davidson went on to write another memoir called Some Boys (1970). As you can get from the title, that book is focused solely on some of the boys he met during his life. I reviewed it in Destroyer 05. It wouldn’t make sense to quote from that book in the calendar though, cause I would just end up quoting the whole book. :O Some Boys is a must-read, whereas you will be able to get the super-abridged version of The World, the Flesh and Myself in my posts about it.

Seriously, if there’s a canon for aesthetes like us, and I think there is, Michael Davidson belongs to it. Learn more about him by following Destroyer’s Advent Calendar!

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson, Some Boys, W. H. Auden

Shallow Tourist available at Gaybooks.de

November 26th, 2011, 11:00 | No comments

Hey boys, now you can buy Shallow Tourist, the sexy boy photo book by Moot, at Gay-and-Lesbianbooks.de. They even wrote a very nice little review to it. Read it in German, because though I understand all of it I find it a bit too hard to translate without losing the feeling of it:

Jetzt macht der Mann hinter dem DESTROYER Magazin, Karl Andersson, also Ernst mit seinem Verlag „Entartetes Leben“ und bringt den ersten Bildband heraus. Jungs und Männer irgendwo zwischen Schutzalter und Volljährigkeit, mal mehr mal weniger bekleidet, findet man(n) „naturgemäß“ darin. Aber auch Bushaltestellen, Landschaften und Essensreste …, denn dieses kleinformatige Coffee-Table-Book ist eine Reisebericht in Bildern durch den Osten Europas. Arty, sexy, schick!

As always, you can also order Shallow Tourist at Ilovemags.com.

Category: Art
Tags: boy photo book, boy photos, ilovemags, teenage boy photography

Rave review of Gay Man’s Worst Friend

November 25th, 2011, 19:37 | No comments

The Dutch bilingual (Dutch and English) gay mag Gay News devotes five pages in their December issue to Destroyer and my book Gay Man’s Worst Friend – the Story of Destroyer Magazine.

The article is written by Hans Hafkamp, who is also the magazine’s editor-in-chief.

Here are some tidbits (I’ve made a few extra line breaks and added bold here and there):

In this day and age it’s asking for trouble if you try to catch the beauty of the Boy in words or images, as someone noted in response to Greer’s book: “We constantly look at very young girls in the media but as soon as it is a boy, we call it pederasty or pedophilia.” The gay community is not any different from the rest of the people. Andersson states – and I think he’s right – that what we think is an acceptable “gay identity” is being narrowed down continually. Shortly after the Stonewall riots in 1969 “homosexuality” meant (almost) all forms of same-sex attraction, but along the way more and more groups were maneuvered to the sideline.”

[...]

Hell broke loose when presenters of the radio program “P3 Homo” expressed their horror. One of them called the first issue “really, really disgusting. I must say I get these ancient Greece vibes, you know this age-hierarchical view on sex and young boys, no it’s disgusting!“

Some time later Sören Juvas, chairman of the Swedish gay rights organization RFSL, for which Andersson also has worked, said in an interview with radio program “P1-morgon” that he couldn’t recognize anything in Destroyer’s philosophy “that a large group of homosexuals think that this is a good thing, that is, feeling sexual lust towards teenage boys.”

A little later in the program he targets Andersson, who’s been taking part in the discussion over the phone, that he “of course sexualise[s] the young teenage boy. [...] I think you’re pushing the boundaries in a way that I don’t think is good. I think this opens up the possibility of abusing young people.”

This homo-bobo criticism stings all the more sharply because it was in orchestra with the Swedish Ombudsman for Children and the extreme right wing. One could expect that Destroyer would be targeted by several neo-Nazi sites, but it still is a surprise that the “professional homosexuals” were up in arms too, and proof of Andersson’s claim that acceptable gay identity has been narrowed down further and further.

Most remarkable – and without any historical awareness – is the criticism on Ancient Greece. A society that was called upon by gay pioneers all through the twentieth century as a paradise, in which homosexuality had a legitimate position. With their objections to Destroyer the politically correct gay spokespersons denounced a large part of modern emancipation history in one single gesture.

[...]

Reading “Gay Man’s Worst Friend” made me think of Sigmund Freud now and then, who once claimed that the aversions most loudly expressed were closest to what was desired in secret. Recent research at the University of Georgia showed that the men who are most vocal about their homophobia, got the most excited sexually while watching gay porn. So one wonders what the Destroyer critics were really so excited about?

[...]

The history and reception of Destroyer [...] raises questions that are not easy to answer. Although “Gay Man’s Worst Friend” only has 128 pages, Andersson presents an overload of material for serious reflection on the direction of the gay community of today. You probably won’t agree with all Andersson has to say, but it won’t hurt to think about the anti-lust rhetoric that surrounds certain topics at the moment.

This was the best review so far (here are the others) – I doubt it can even get better. To have an intellectual and historically aware gay man of the old school read my book and pick up on obvious (but still missed by so many!) references and criticisms was exactly what I had hoped for when I wrote it. All the better when such a reader is in charge of a fag rag!

Still don’t have the book? Order it from me or from Amazon! (Amazon has 5 copies in stock as I write this.)

Category: Destroyer
Tags: Destroyer, Destroyer Magazine, gay, gay identity, Gay Man's Worst Friend, gay movement, Gay News, Hans Hafkamp, Karl Andersson, P3 Homo, RFSL, Sören Juvas, Stonewall

Now shipping: The Destroyer book

"What this slender book does is chart the magazine’s history and backlash, presenting a calm rational response to the hysterical screams of paedophilia. It is, on the whole, quite convincing." -Gay Times, June 2011