Adonis Diaries

The Gods of beauty: Before the age of pimples (February 7, 2009)

Note:  I was inspired for this article by the critical introduction of Vincent-Mansour Monteil for his book “Abu Nawas”, the great Arab poet of the early Abbasseed period around the year 800.    

Through the ages, boys of 15 or a little less (khoumasi) were erotically more prized than girls of the same age in all civilizations.  Androgynous boys (effeminate, khanith) had grace in movement, they had pretty oval faces, fleshy, soft and smooth skins, and their muscle were firmer.  The western cultures are familiar with the tales and literatures of the antique Greek and Roman civilizations on that subject; for example, Socrates was a famous pedophile and his wife went as far as taking her husband to court.

            Abu Nuwass had Janane, an Iranian lesbian, as a front for his homosexuality and a particular penchant for the boys who were Christian Iranians serving as peons or slave pages in the courts of the affluent and powerful.  “You look like a boy but you are indeed a girl” (Abu Nawass) and “Man is a continent. Woman is a sea.  I prefer very much the firm land”.

I saw a movie done in Afghanistan during the Taliban regime; this very old sheikh purchased a pretty boy who was to be executed (she was indeed a girl who had her hair cut and dressed like a boy); when the sheikh was training the boys how to wash their testicles before prayer he was smitten by the boy/girl and repeated this verse of the Koran of those serving the predestined to Paradise “The peon (ghilman) are immortal Adonis, similar to hidden pearls”

            Rimbaud also had taken as front an indigenous woman in Harari (Ethiopia/Eritrea) so that he may reserve his total love for Djami, his companion and boy of 15.  Verlaine and Baudelaire had also the same preference.  Shakespeare wrote his sonnets, the first 126 sonnets for “My lovely boy; a very young man, barely an adolescent”; and also “A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted, Hast thou the Master Mistress of my passion”

            Leonardo Da Vinci had the same preferences as Abu Nawass for boys of 15 of age; he bequest his inheritance to Francesco Melzi whom he had known at the “fatal age”.  Michel Angelo dedicated 50 epitaphs to Cecchino Bracci, dead at age 15 and was hopelessly in love with the indifferent Tommaso de’ Cavalieri “Who will defend me of your beautiful face?”  The best and most beautiful characters in the paintings of these giant artists are the androgynous young boys.  The difference between these two great painters is that Michel Angelo never dared satisfy “Biblically” his pedophilic urges who was mocked by the Pope Jules II as suffering of “terribilita”.

            Pederasty was common phenomenon in England in the turn of the last century, as long as gentleman did not display their loved boy publicly.  Oscar Wilde paid for his exhibitionism and outlandish temperament a long prison term.  Pedophilia is rampant everywhere now and internet and special websites are serving secret desires.  The Roman Catholic Church is still battling court cases of priests taking advantage of multitude of young boys studying in Catholic schools.

            Sodom and Gomorra might be fictitious two towns in the Bible that were burned by Jehovah but it illustrate that pederasty is an ancient and a prevalent erotic tendency in all ages and all civilizations.  Maybe sex among the same gender is a front to cover a deeper emotional predilection: maybe societies should start to accept the fact that the majority of people of both genders are unable to taking the drastic decision and making the serious effort to comprehend the other sex and prefer the community of their own gender.