Advent Calendar 17th December 2011: Berlin, Berlin!

December 17th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

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.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Berlin, Michael Davidson, prostitution

Advent Calendar 16th December 2011: Public baths part 5 – playful masturbatory frolic

December 16th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

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)

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson, public baths

Advent Calendar 15th December 2011: Public baths part 4 – scampering urchins

December 15th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

We’re already on the 15th of December, so we’ll skip a chapter where Michael Davidson associates with the Bloomsbury people in 1920s London. Instead, we’re going to Oxford. It’s now 1927 and Davidson has just turned 30. We read from page 148 (chapter 10) in The World, the Flesh and Myself:

My principal memories of Oxford are summer ones: of Long Bridges, sylvan and sunlit, the ‘town’ bathing place along the tow-path from Folly Bridge, where bare wet bodies dived and darted and Robert Dundas of Christ Church, that massive and renowned don, lay on the grass like a contemplative walrus and appraised the scampering urchins around him.

Dundas was one of those Oxford ‘characters’ famous for foibles and idiosyncracies; and famous for his curt, downright remarks uttered in the jerky, high-pitched contralto that was made to be mimicked. One day, when Wystan Auden was up at the House, Dundas sent for him. ‘Oh, Auden –’ the great man snapped. ‘I wanted to tell you – I can’t be your tutor any longer. You see, I’m in love with you –. Good morning!’

Once, when I was with him at Long Bridges, lying beside parallel bars that had just been installed, he roused himself from his Olympian lethargy to say: ‘I presented this gymnastic apparatus to the municipality’; and added curtly, gazing up from ground level at the naked acrobatics going on above: ‘Very good investment, don’t you think?’

For as long as civic memory went back, men and boys at the ‘town’ bathing places …

To be continued tomorrow!

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson, Oxford, public baths

Advent Calendar 14th December 2011: Mentoring W. H. Auden

December 14th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

In 1923 Michael Davidson, then 26, was introduced to Wystan Auden, then 16, or W. H. Auden as he would be called when he became famous. They developed “a poetical relationship” that was mainly maintained by letters; Davidson can pride himself on having discovered Auden, in a literary sense. Not only did he mentor and encourage him during two years, but he was also the first one to publish the young poet. Here’s from page 127 (chapter eight) in The World, the Flesh and Myself:

Auden, as I remember him then, was tall and gangling, with fair hair limp across a pale forehead and clumsy limbs apt to go adrift; and an odd, cogitative face that was frighteningly unboyish. He seemed too engrossed in thought to be boyish; it was the face of a mind far older than its age and already had that look of puritan sternness which signifies contempt for all intellectual time-wasting.

He was very like he is today – already Stravinsky’s ‘big blond intellectual bloodhound’ – but fairer and less rugged. His face wasn’t, of course, yet rutted with those singular corrugations which seem like the seismic result of terrific intellectual commotion; but the tenderness of its boyhood was oddly combined with an extra-ordinary grown-up austerity.

I was bewitched at the first meeting; not by a physical attrativeness, which I didn’t find (beyond the general one of adolescence), but by the blinding discovery, as in a revelation, that here was wonderfully joined that divine freak called genius with the magical age of sixteen.

The maturity of even his smallest remarks, a kind of inspired wisdom which, in his company, one couldn’t help being aware of, was alarming; and I knew instantly that, though ten years older, I was shamefully his inferior in intellect and learning. But he went to my romantic head like one’s second Pernod; I saw that I had found my boy Keats or Chatterton, on whom I would lavish all I could muster of literary maternalism. I was in love; but I think I deliberately chose to be in love.

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

Advent Calendar 13th December 2011: Public baths part 3 – first encounter with the Thought Police

December 13th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

London in 1922. Michael Davidson is 25 years old and frequents the city’s bath houses. In addition to them, “a strip of the Serpentine in Hyde Park had been insulated by tradition and a surprisingly unprudish Board of Works for the bathing of ‘males only’.” Davidson notes that “there was a wonderful lot of juvenile nudity there”. That’s where the following passage takes place – page 121 (the beginning of chapter eight) in The World, the Flesh and Myself:

On this day, which was to leave a permanent bruise of private shame, I had taken my bathing-drawers and, aware of the notice ‘bathers only’, was sitting on the grass wondering how chilly the breeze blowing from the Marble Arch might be – besides, I had lent my slip to a boy who was shyer than most about going in with nothing on.

All at once the delicious scene was harshly shivered: I was being astonishingly spoken to by a policeman, being ordered to ‘go along’ with him out of the bathing enclave; I was in the hands of the Law.

By not instantly undressing and plunging into the water, by dallying on the bank fully clad, I’d broken a Parks Regulation – that was all; yet walking under police escort, I felt that each of those staring eyes was boring into my secret mind, that every man and boy discerned that I was ‘like that’, that I was being arrested for thinking illegal thoughts. I became parched with shame and humiliation – all my privacies, I thought, were lying bare.

This was rubbish, existing only in my own mind; yet it left me through life with a pursuing anxiety: a furtive, backward-glancing, collar-turned-up sensation of being watched by a special branch of Orwell’s Thought Police.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson, public baths

« Newer posts — Older posts »

New magazine: Entartete Shota!

Entartete Shota brings you the popular Japanese manga genre shotacon (boy sex comics) in English translation.

Enjoy 28 pages of young boy on boy sex!

The premier issue, released in April 2012, was printed in a limited edition of 500 copies.

Buy or preview Entartete Shota!

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