Re: pedo in a speedo

At 10:49 PM +0000 12/30/05, Guy_Fawkes99 wrote:
>But the theme (and its frequency) is so
>discomfitting for me and for a lot of readers that I have to wonder
>why it's so important for Delany to keep revisiting it.  What point
>is he trying to make that's so imperative it's worth alienating and
>risking a lot of readers over?

I was an early reader of Delany--started reading him in junior high 
at about 13 years old, with Triton and Empire Star and Babel-17. I 
read Dhalgren in high school (i.e., while still a minor--only 
slightly younger than Denny).

I say that by way of leading up to this tentative 
suggestion/observation: Perhaps he includes children being sexual and 
having sex in order to be realistic. I think perhaps one of the most 
dangerous aspects of our culture in terms of keeping children from 
sexual abuse is the tendency to deny the sexuality of children. By 
seeing them as innocent of sexuality and without sexual interests, as 
beings who don't pursue sexual activity, we leave them completely 
unarmed for the sexual predators who use and twist that innate 
interest in sexuality.

I was never sexually abused and never had sex with an adult while I 
was a minor. However, I recall finding opportunities to get naked and 
vaguely sexual with neighborhood kids when I was as young as seven, 
having mutual masturbatory sex with a cousin one year older than me 
starting at 11,  and this escalated to oral sex at 12 and anal sex at 
13.

This may seem to contradict my other recent posts, but I think here 
of the discussions of Delany's own youthful sexuality in his memoir, 
and that of his peers, and think that perhaps this informs his 
fiction about sexualized minors.

That in his pornography (Tides of Lust/Equinox and Hogg) this 
involves situations that we would objectively consider abusive but 
that the participants involved do not opens up a dialogue about 
whether it is age itself that makes such situations abusive. In Hogg, 
it seems that once our narrator starts to feel that the situation is 
abusive, he leaves (and speaks for the first time).

The above are just tentative thoughts on the issue, which I really 
haven't given much thought to before, because the sexuality of 
children in his books really hadn't struck me as extraordinary, but 
rather as a fairly realistic extensions of my own sexual desires when 
I was a boy.


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