And so Destroyer finally made it into the world’s biggest gay magazine – head out to buy the February issue of Out for an interview with me, Karl Andersson. An excerpt:

Andersson began his career in traditional journalism, helming Sweden’s glossy gay magazine, Straight, and working at newspapers. He sees Destroyer as a link to a bygone era that was sacrificed as homosexuality became mainstream.

“The gay movement has lost touch with its past,” he says. “It was founded to a large extent by men who were attracted to adolescent boys in Germany in the beginning of the 20th century. That should be acknowledged and it isn’t. We should honor them because we owe them our freedoms – instead, we despise them.”

Read the whole story here – or click the image above to zoom.

Back to Michael Davidson’s autobiography The World, the Flesh and Myself – and our last quote from it. It’s 1947 now. Davidson is 50 years old and has just got a job as a foreign correspondent for UK newspaper The Observer. His first assignment is to go to Morocco.

We read from page 223 (chapter 14):

My first concern was to find Mustapha. I scoured the places where he was likely to be but could find no trace; until one Sunday we came face to face by the main door of the cathedral, and caused surprise among the ladies of Résidence society who were going in for Mass by weeping for happiness upon each other’s necks.

He was now 23, married with a child, and working as chauffeur to a French government official. [...] We picked up our friendship; and Mustapha was kind, in an avuncular way, to my new boy Sidi Salah.

Dear readers, this will be it for this year! Maybe we’ll continue next December, because we’re actually only halfway through this amazing book. Bad planning on my side, but there was simply too much to quote. I’ve enjoyed rereading Davidson’s memoirs, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the abridged version published on this blog.

Now get the book; it belongs in the canon – our canon!

In Rabat I met Mustapha. In was one of those magnetic encounters of the eyes, beneath the evening lamps of the Boulevard Galliéni, that lead sometimes to a brief bit of amusing commerce and sometimes – but O, so rarely! – to an ineffable happiness. From that evening on, Mustapha and I were together for nearly three years; until the fall of France cut brutally our lives apart. Once again I’d found that ‘divine friend’; Werner was reincarnate in Mustapha – without Werner’s peerless verve and glitter, but with the same sweet genuine loyalty, and, in place of Werner’s peremptory passion, a soft and wistful gentleness.

I supposed Mustapha to be about 14. He thought so too; but since Moroccans counted their birthdays from some unrecorded point in history like the summer the drought killed 50 sheep or the year the afreet appeared in the guise of a jackal, speaking with the voice of a man; and since they build their years out of lunar months, it’s best to assess an age by looking, as it were, at the teeth. He had the true Berber’s sweet oval face, snub and artless, with none of the Arab’s semite severity; his tribe were the Sghana, who grazed sheep over the plain above Marrakesh.

We went to Beni Mellal in the northern green skirts of the Atlas, where seven streams kept the encircling village lands lush with fruit and flower; and lived in a sparkling white palace where, in the evenings, on the chequered tiles of our patio with its colonnade of delicate arches, Mustapha played on his one-stringed lute small plaintive melodies which hovered up and down among the three or four notes which compose the Arab key, while I sipped red wine and watched his brown plucking fingers.

The man who kills does no more than shorten a human life. But a man who corrupts a young lad or girl destroys one – and that is worse.

He compares this with the Spanish Inquisitors, who argued that “a murderer only murdered people’s bodies whereas a heretic murdered their souls.” Thus proving that there’s a religious aspect in the so called protection of youth. Davidson comments (page 171 in The World, the Flesh and Myself):

It seems likely that remarks like this are prompted more by hatred and fear of heresy than by a heart sorrowing for the countless innocent souls waiting to be corrupted.

One understands that the first paragraph of the book is well-founded. It goes:

This is the life-history of a lover of boys. It’s a first-hand report, therefore, on that heresy which, in England especially, is reprobated above all others.

Today, 50 years after Davidson wrote his autobiography, that is truer than ever.

I’ve always considered that most of the sexual actions one’s nature drives one unreasonably to perform are too silly for words. Why, I ask, does one want to do such pointless things? Yet at the moment, nothing in life seems so important.

When these things are publicly described in the nerveless tones of a dusty solicitor from the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and publicly ascribed to oneself, sittin in the dock under the public’s goggling eye, they make one feel not only imbecile but also a monster; in his mouth things which seemed to one perfectly natural became horribly deformed. And that, evidently, is what’s intended.

Davidson didn’t get probation. He got jail.

In the middle of 1936 I was living in a mean room off the Camden Road. Here I was ‘mothering’ a boy called Ray, a truant from home or perhaps reformatory: a touching psychopathic creature who lied and stole and wetted the bed in which he lay until it was time to go to the ‘pictures’; but whose nature was so loaded with pathos and need for affection that one was filled with fondness and compassion.

Plenty of food cured the bed-wetting; but no amount of coddling could cure anything else; and one day he walked out, taking what little I had – luckily it was a day I’d taken my typewriter out.

My behaviour, in these years, was disastrous, and leading me – obviously, had I paused to look – straight to my ‘first row’. I was drinking more than usual; and with more than usual frenzy was chasing ‘romance’: Millard would have disapproved.

I had no beloved, though many delusions of love – ‘in each of them I saw the sign of the one I was waiting for’, wrote Carlo Coccioli in his extraordinary novel of Florence and Paris, ‘The Eye and the Heart’.

That is the impulsion, the motive power, of the prowling paederast – the unending search for the ‘divine friend, much desired’. One tried to look, always, beyond the brevity of pleasure.

And then I met Werner. I had, of course, surveyed the city’s swimming-baths; and most afternoons was going to those in the Bärwaldstrasse, somewhere in the wilderness beyond Hallesches Tor. And there one day, naked beneath the showers, I found the most startingly beautiful person I’d ever seen: a living, and lively, Beardsley decoration of ‘Salome’ – he might have been the original Beardsley prototype, except that he was an improvement on the artist’s invention. He had all the Beardsley sin, but none of the corruption; all the grace and uniqueness, but without the epicene languour. His was the face Beardsley would have drawn, had he not been dying of consumption. Ivory-white skin, parchment-pale, with a fervent scarlet mouth and huge sable eyes, full of black fire; a mass of romping black hair, thick and lively as a bear’s, and the figure of a Gemito fisherboy. To Beardsley he added something of the della Robbia choristers in Florence and a great deal of the famous ‘Tripod’ satyrs in the Naples Museum. It didn’t surprise me to find that this face had been chosen from all over Germany to go on the cover of the magazine published by the Socialist Labour Youth – whose blue blouse and red scarf he wore.

But, I quickly found, it wasn’t only his face that was intoxicating; it was a glittering personality and the incomparable friendship that he gave – in his magic company differences of age, culture, language, vanished: he made me his equal and partner. Was ist mein ist Dein, he pronounced early on; and that remained his rule for the next few years – what was his was mine: he would share, when I was broke, his last cigarettes; and gave to the last drop his love and loyalty. I had found at last the ‘divine friend much desired’; if one of us was faithless it was I – never he.

Before I knew what was happening, that first day, I’d been swept on to the back of his bicycle and was whirling down the Friedrichstrasse – to a schwules Lokal, one of those ‘queer’ bars whose discreetly blacked-out façades and sombrely curtained doorways proclaimed out loud their nature, where we drank cognac.

He was not quite 15. Then, from the homosexual bar, he bicycled me back to his home in the Zimmerstrasse and introduced me to his mother.

We must have been an astonishing sight, Werner and I: roistering round Berlin with our arms round each other’s necks; both with long bare legs and open necks; singing Wanderlieder or socialist songs, drinking a great deal, embracing and spooning in public places and generally behaving outrageously – I skinnily ugly and 30 years old; he dazzling in looks, with that astonishing head and face in which the angelic and the demonic were tantalisingly blended.

You have read a passage from chapter 11 (page 152-153) of Michael Davidson’s autobiography The World, the Flesh and Myself.

Chapter 11 in Michael Davidson’s The World, the Flesh and Myself begins with a description of Berlin in the 1920s, with its Strichjungen and Stundenhotels, theaters that produced “serious plays of a sexual audacity that would have shocked London for the next 25 years”, and, of course, Magnus Hirschfeld’s legendary Institut der Sexualwissenschaft, in whose library Davidson would “spend hours”. Just think of it. Hirschfeld’s institute and its library were to be destroyed by Hitler just a few years later. Page 151 (chapter 11):

I discovered, too, the amazing tolerance of Berlin; the people generally accepted as a human fact, even though many deplored, conduct which in England would have raised cries of horror or menace.

Once a policeman appeared when I was having difficulty with an offensive youth whom I couldn’t shake off. ‘You know,’ said the policeman kindly, ‘you should be very careful about what boys you pick up – there are some bad ones about.’

I had a Swiss friend whom I’ll call B—: a senior functionary in one of the international organizations in Geneva. He kept going a pied-à-terre in Berlin; and there one morning, he told me later, he found on his doorstep when he answered the whirr of his bell a well-dressed man in a Homburg hat and carrying the inevitable briefcase.

‘Herr B—?’ said the stranger.

‘Jawohl’, answered B— inquiringly.

‘I believe you’re a friend of a boy named —?’ the man went on. B— was taken aback; but the visitor hastened to put him at his ease. ‘Oh, it’s all right,’ he said. ‘I just came to call – I always like to know what sort of man my son is going with.’

That was Berlin in the years that I knew it, between 1928 and 1933.

For as long as civic memory went back, men and boys at the ‘town’ bathing places, like members of the University at Parson’s Pleasure, had worn nothing at all; it was an Oxford tradition – a tradition which old Dundas (he must have been in his late 50s) was mightily concerned to preserve.

At Long Bridges he was down like a ton of bricks on the slightest little playful masturbatory frolic among the boys; and when, on the green sward of that lovely tree-encircled backwater, I appeared with my camera and told him I had discovered a ‘new vice’ – taking photographs with the camera apparently pointing in one direction, while in fact the lense was eyeing another – he went back to his rooms and wrote me a four-sheet letter of close small handwriting beginning, ‘I’m very worried about your “new vice”‘ [...]

… by the time I revisited Oxford in 1941, summoned there by the branch of the War Office that was planning an assault on the coast of Morocco, the verdant candour of Long Bridges had been defiled by rows of bathing-boxes and the place given over to the sexual swagger and simpering prurience of mixed bathing.

(Page 148-149, chapter 10, of Michael Davidson’s autobiography The World, the Flesh and Myself)