Brongersma book examines boy/man love

Loving Boys: A Multidisciplinary Study of Sexual Relations Between Adult and Minor Males, vol. 1. Dr. Edward Brongersma, with introduction by Dr. Vern L. Bullough. Global Academic Publishers, Amsterdam and New York, 1987. 335 pp.

This review was supplied by the publisher. Hopefully a critical review will follow.

Erotic attraction and sexual relations between male adults and boys has been a persistent phenomenon in many cultures, including our own, throughout history. The author, a retired Dutch senator and distinguished jurist, examines boy love culturally, anthropologically, psychologically, and ethically. He draws on published sources from virtually all of the major Western European languages, as well as on many examples from his own extensive files of case histories and research documents.

Brongersma discusses what he considers the four major functions of sex: procreation, love, pleasure, and as part of a mystical experience, and show how they apply to the boy's experiential world. He then describes the nature of a man's erotic feelings for a boy. In so doing, he examines and discredits many of the current popular stereotypes of the boy-lover's personality, and corrects some of the widely reported misconceptions of why the boy-lover seeks the company of boys. Finally, he examines the sexuality of boys, and shows how many boys might become sexually involved with sympathetic men. Brongersma offers reasoned arguments for considering man-boy erotic relationships little different, ethically, from other sorts of erotic bonding between humans. One way in which social orthodoxy is perpetuated is by insisting that minorities not be taken seriously when they give witness to their own condition. Married men can write about marriage and bankers about banking, but only heterosexuals attracted to adults of the species can be relied upon to give "sound" reports on homosexuality and pedophilia.

Born in 1911 in Haarlem, The Netherlands, Brongersma received his Doctor of Law degree during World War II and, shortly after the war ended, entered the Dutch Senate. He was appointed chairperson of the important Permanent Committee for Justice from 1968 until his retirement in 1977, and was knighted by the Queen of The Netherlands in 1975 for distinguished service as a Member of Parliament. Brongersma's training and experience as a lawyer and jurist enable him to approach his subject as a "committed observer." His object is to communicate what he sees as the multiple realities of love and sex between the adult male and the youth or boy which lie behind the simplistic stereotypes stemming from our Judeo-Christian tradition and from today's fashionable, but flawed, conception sex differences on the medical model.

At the outset, he asks what are the purposes of sex, and how do they relate to adolescent and pre-adolescent males. Although in today's Western culture, they are not encouraged to be procreative, many boys from a very early age are ready to receive sexually expressed love and increasingly ready to give it; they are certainly capable of enjoying sex and participating in its mystic aspects. Brongersma then describes the adult lover of boys, the nature of his attraction to a boy, and what it is about boys which arouses his erotic interest. He gives many examples of institutionalized boy love in other cultures and in the pre-Christian roots of our own. The professional literature about "the pederast" or "the child molester" he finds deplorable. It is fatally flawed by blatantly biased premises, emotive terminology, outright moralizing, and a fundamental reliance on the medically-invented premise that all sexual variance is an illness caused by childhood trauma. As a practical matter, he finds little resemblance between the many boy-lovers he has encountered in his professional life and the profiles offered by the "experts."

The author then discusses the young male's sexual world, and more specifically the experience of passing through puberty, when the genitals become an increased source of, intense interest to the boy, and new mental and emotional worlds open up before his eyes. The various sexual outlets permitted to a boy in our culture are somewhat limited, at least initially. Preoccupation with his own genitals leads the healthy, inquisitive boy through masturbation to sex contacts of varying seriousness with other males. Many examples of such boy-love relationships are cited in Brongersma's text. What a boy can gain from a passionate relationship with a man over those with a boy of his own age are next examined: the loving man's role as a boy's first real lover, a teacher, a confidante, a patron, a means of escaping an unhappy home environment. Brongersma writes about the relationship of the man-boy couple to the boy's parents, his peers, and to society in general. Finally he discusses the end of the affair when the boy, as usually happens, grows sexually away from the man and moves toward men or women while, at the same time, in maturing, often loses his sexual attractiveness for the man.

Brongersma feels man-boy sex and love are a natural phenomenon engaged in by normal men and boys. It can, of course, be good or bad depending upon the nature of the participants and the way they handle their responsibilities toward one another.

source: Book review 'Brongersma Book Examines Boy/man Love'; NAMBLA Bulletin, vol. 8, no. 7; September 1987