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 9th December 2011: Prostitution

December 9th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

Michael Davidson on prostitution (The World, the Flesh and Myself, page 90):

Because, I suppose, my sexual objective has never been primarily physical gratification, I’ve never liked ‘prostitutes’ – people, I mean, for whom the primary objective is payment. Of course, every sexual transaction contains an element of ‘prostitution’; a girl expects a present or a seat at the pictures; a bride – even at St Margaret’s – wants position or security; a young man, from his patron, male or female, hopes for a new suit; a boy needs cigarette-money or a new inner-tube for his bicycle.

‘Love’, whatever its form, requires a tit-for-tat – it’s a kind of natural law.

But for sexual pleasure, for emotional happiness, the ‘love’ must come first, the honararium second in the scale of preference. No fortuitous ‘pick-up’ could ever attract me unless genuine sexual interest were his first motive – or unless there were a touching need of ‘mothering’; the frequent combination of both hankerings in the farouche boys of Berlin was one of that city’s enthralling features in 1930-33.

As we will see later on in this advent calendar!

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: boy prostitute, Michael Davidson, prostitution, rent boys

Boy, 14, buys sex from girl, 13

September 8th, 2009, 22:58 | 1 comment

The 14-year-old Japanese schoolboy met the 13-year-old schoolgirl online and convinced her to sell sex to him. He claimed to be 18 years old, which he thought would be more tempting for the girl than to have sex with a 14-year-old. Full story here.

Category: News & Politics
Tags: 14yo boys, Japan, prostitution, teenage boys

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