Reaction to 'Christmas Stories'

By: Luc Schoonhove

I would like to react to the 'Christmas Stories' by five members of the editorial staff in OK # 61, and then especially to the elements loneliness and hating the month of December, which surface several times in these articles. Because it is difficult to react to five different articles at the same time, and because it seems madness to me anyway to object to the authors' personal feelings, I think I just start with myself...

My first pedophile memory - at least, in which I am the older of the two - dates, roughly, from the first half of the seventies. The image which will always stay in my memory is how I look out from over my homework, through the window of our upstairs flat, on the windows on the other side of the street. I must be fifteen. In one of the windowsills of the ground-floor flat Sylvia is sitting, with her knees pulled up and dressed in a kind of Hungarian dress, enjoying the sun. Sylvia is a neighbour girl opposite aged ten and the windowsill of her elderly downstairs neighbours is the place where she usually chats with her girlfriends. I still see before me how the neighbour girl lets herself slip from the windowsill and performs a small turning dance on bare feet, by which the red skirt of the dress spreads into its full width, and knickers as white as snow become visible. I have no more memories of this event - except for the great excitement I felt.

I must have dared address Sylvia later on the street, for I remember that we were friends more or less for a short time. Sylvia was a friendly and open girl and I think she was very pleased with the attention from a boy who was already at secondary school. Maybe you could still call it 'normal': a boy and a girl with five years between them - but I must not add then that the girl was a scamp with short blond hair and that especially her flat breast and her smooth body fascinated the boy immoderately.

Apparently, my secondary school period went by normally. At class parties I fiddled with girls my age and, judging report marks, I was best of my class for years. It was nobody's business that, secretly, I cut out small photos of Boy Dominic from the TV-guide and that at night in bed I fantasized that I was allowed to give coaching to Guido & Jeroen - these most charming twins from the first form - and that we did not get round hard to teaching material.

That was what my youth looked like; at daytime (sincerely) in love with girls from my class and at night dreaming about little James - this adorable small supporting role from The Little House. I did not see this as a problem. 'Something happening' between you and young boys was not such a big deal at the time; it was just like being a Feyenoord supporter, I presume; it is not a crime, though you'd better keep it to yourself in most places.

When I was already studying for a long time, I had my first real girlfriend. I loved her with all my heart; I would have followed her to the end of the world. We had a brief, intense relationship, until she suddenly broke it off, without a warning beforehand. In a conversation which lasted a whole evening, she did not manage to make me clear what her motives were.

During the winter following this, I was totally upset. I walked about like a living deadman. My aversion to women must be rooted in those dark months - women who say yes, and think no, or the other way around, and who blame 'man' for all the misery that there is in the world.

One year later, December 1984, I saw The Neverending Story in the cinema. Enchanted and madly in love, I left the house afterwards. The big difference with the past was my dreaming of Atreya at night ànd during daytime. What exactly happened in between I do not know anymore, but it is certain that, half a year later, I was twenty-six and in the valuable possession of a boyfriend half my age - a dream of flesh blood this time. Since these days I consider myself a fulltime pedo. I go for pre-adolescent boys, though from time to time I have an adolescent boyfriend who has remained sweet despite all the hormonal attacks. (The sweetest boy that happened to me is almost eighteen by now and still sweeter than any other I have ever known.)

I don't think that one movie or one book can change your life. However, I am convinced that one story or one photograph or one accidental encounter or whatever, can bring up in one explosion what has been slumbering right under the surface for years. To me The Neverending Story has been the catalyst. At the moment itself I realized that I was so in love as I had never been with a girl before; and now, looking back, I think that the movie has made me clear that, with enough fantasy and courage you can see and feel and think and experience other things than all those other people around you.

I spent the first years after 1984 exploring pedo existence. I found out that there were associations and serious magazines for people like me - sometimes half bookshops. The mere proofs which I met everywhere that there are other people as peculiar as me, who can look at a ten or twelve-year-old little lad with the same eyes, were a sign to me that a life was granted to me in which I could play the role of myself.

By the way, it turned out allright a bit with these nasty women. From the moment on that I don't see women as potential lovers, it is getting much better. (I am only at odds, for some reason, with horseriding girls, who collect everything from the Spice Girls and who deny in every possible way that they are in love with their horses.) My mother has recovered on her own a considerable piece of ground for womenfolk. Some minimal inaccuracies on my part were enough for her to estimate my inclination rightly. After I had admitted in a roundabout way that I cared more for small boys than for big girls, that was that to her. As soon as she knew the ins and outs of the matter, and I had made her clear that usually I don't do stupid things, she reconciled to it. In the meantime, I regained my respect for the woman-as-a-mother. My present little mate's mother is a bitch of the first order, which does not alter the fact that I admire her for taking care of my boy with such total abandon.

Now, why this history lesson? I think that I want to illustrate especially that pedo life is a livable life, as soon as you know who you are and as soon as you see that it is the only life for you. You will need to prepare that your existence will deviate from all the grey people's around you. You will meet ugly things, which are spared to others, but there will be in it that you meet unequalled beauties and sweetnesses, to which all these grey eyes keep being closed. You only need to afford that you keep your eyes (and your heart) opened.

My proposition is that the existence as a pedo is a tremendous luxury, which has the only disadvantage that you have to bear the cost of it completely out of your own pocket. If you are not prepared to that, you will have to choose another profession. I know that there are people who give up the fight and become gay for convenience's sake.

Loneliness at Christmas? I am not bothered by that. Long beforehand, I look forward to December. I look forward to the dark days with the lights in the tree and the candles in front of the stable. Like a child I enjoy 'the days of red cellophane and glitter and cotton wool and star paper'1 and all the other Christmas kitsch. Of course, it is boring that, for my sweetheart, I am dependent on school and on the sports club and that both of them are closed round Christmas for two weeks. That's why I just refuel during the Christmas celebration at school, right before the holidays. (Whoever, for God's sake, has paired me to him this year?? Who has reserved a seat next to him for me at the party in the auditorium?? There are 250 kids I might have sitting next to - but I was sitting next to him! Did he cook it up himself? Or his class teacher? Or the manager? For, gradually, no one could have failed to notice that both of us always have a cold at the same time. Or do miracles really exist?!)

After a Christmas present like that, I will surely make it through the days. In the evening I watch a greasy Christmas movie on commercial TV about a couple of cute kids with a couple of cute problems, in the morning I listen in bed to a Christmas stories competition on the radio and in the afternoon I visit boring acquaintances with nice kids, or if need be nice acquaintances with a couple of little creeps - I'll surely make it through the days. The summer holidays are too long for me, but the Christmas holidays are just long enough to catch my breath from my nice but ever so tiring boyfriend. Of cóurse I miss him! But he ain't so far away. When I close my eyes, I see him again at the Christmas celebration, with his jacket and his bow tie and his combed hair. And when I close my eyes once again, I feel the heath of his glowing cheeks again, and I see the lights reflect in his eyes. I thank heaven that I always appear to be a hyper-romantic exactly at the right moments.

It is not my intention to evade the pain of pedophile life. On the contrary! There is enough pain - more than enough for one human life. But the funny thing is that the real pain is never enclosed in my relationship with a young boy. From time to time I am in distress about a boy, but never did a boy himself hurt me. The real pain is always carried up by people who have nothing to do with both of us.

There is one adult friend who knows about my peculiarities and whom I am allowed to badger silly when I am at a loss about something. Otherwise, I control myself everywhere I go. I cannot or dare not be myself almost anywhere. During group discussions at birthdays, among friends'-friends who would never be my friends, I am almost bursting when silly jokes are made about Michael Jackson, or when Marc Dutroux, in initiation of some quality newspaper, is once again indicated as this Belgian pedophile. At school I need to choose my words extremely carefully, when I cannot control myself any longer towards a nine-year-old girl and want to make clear somehow that I think the only fascinating thing about Aaron Carter's singles is the sleeves.

I have several friends (couples) whom I suspect of reacting not too negatively, should I reveal my inclination to them. They know me long enough to know I am not a monster. I think most of them would be able to think sufficiently balanced about my inclination. Unfortunately, they all have pre-schoolers by now, who don't want more than sit on your lap and give kisses. I cannot bear to think about the associations people may suddenly have, when they see their children crawl, not onto this nice friend's lap, but onto a pedophile's lap.

But, far more than the friends' or the friends'-friends' incomprehension and prejudice, it is the maliciousness you hear about nowadays, especially through the media, which makes me experience the pain. Self-declared professionals are given all the space to show, by the most idiotic pronouncements, that they don't have the faintest idea what pedophelia is about, how a pedo is put together, or how there can be a difference between a child molester and a pedo. I find it incomprehensible, that, of all people from whom you might expect some understanding - psychologists, sexuologists, therapists - they are precisely the ones who show the greatest incomprehension and the hugest pedo hate. For instance, the usually well-meaning small broadcasting corporation IKON (Dutch interdenominational broadcasting corporation) brought onto the screen in December '97 a portrait of a Belgian woman therapist, who had gone off the rails and from whom the hate towards men spattered off. She worked (odd enough) with both 'victims' and 'perpetrators'; she did not make any difference between pedophiles, child molesters and child murderers; she manufactured dolls of monsters with long fingers in her leisure time; and at night, alone in the house, she had long conversations with dead children. If you think that someone like that is allowed to continue her 'therapeutic' work as easy as that, you know that (at least in Belgium) everything is possible nowadays.

Nevertheless, the madness has a positive side too. After a broadcast like that, I never feel affected for a long time, because I see that the witch hunt starts to become grotesque in such a way that it can never be long before the madness does itself in. Here and there, small newspaper articles which dare carefully cast doubts about it, are already coming to the surface.

But, enough now about the ugliness! I'm just trying to demonstrate that pedo life can be beautiful! My boyfriend will never hurt me deliberately - that's what it just is about for me. Of course, pedo life knows about loneliness, and of course not everything is going smoothly, and of course there are plenty of nice boys who don't like the look of me, and of course that is their right; but all the same pedo life is the most fascinating life I can imagine. When I feel lonley (I write this on Christmas' Eve, hah, hah!), I close my eyes and remember his glowing cheeks, and then I know that my sweetheart is not far away. I know plenty of people who would find this consolation much too poor. But, I would object, how, for heaven's sake, could the thought of what I consider, without exaggeration, the most beautiful thing on earth, be a poor consolation?

And further? Further I don't think much. When I know that this breath-taking little lad-aged-six goes out shopping in the supermarket with his mother on Saturday mornings, then you won't see me there on Friday afternoons. That is, in short, the whole trick. If I don't make any further demands and don't make any plans, pedo life is attractive and fascinating enough. I just need to keep my eyes wide open. For, if I watch carefully, I see the beauty and the fun and the love rolling up to me from all directions.

I look forward to the day now already that I will turn seventy and that I will introduce very proudly to the birthday guests a handsome little fellow aged ten as my new boyfriend. This kid will be begotten only in 2018! His mother may be only a baby now. Isn't this a fascinating thought?

source: Reaction to 'Christmas Stories' by Luc Schoonhove; Translated from Dutch; OK Magazine, no. 62; March 1998