No Frigging Way

OK—a guy I don‘t know wrote a comment on my Facebook page to Taí, who had posted the piece I wrote on Ratzinger yesterday. And the unknown guy suggested that “the same people who made homosexuality a sexual orientation are now declaring pedophilia a sexual orientation.”

Say what?

Seems like a slur, doesn’t it, on a par with suggesting that allowing gay men to marry will inevitably lead to men marrying their dogs? But it’s an unimpeachable source—The Guardian—and so worth looking up.

Confession—I have nothing to confess. I have never knowingly had sex with a minor, even when I was, in fact, a minor. I say this with no pride—this is not a matter of heroic efforts at self-control. I’m just not into it.

I am into guys—I know that’s a shocker—however, and I spent seven years at Wal-Mart and thirteen years at Inlingua teaching them. And in all of that time, how many of those students did I bed?

Zero.

And why not? They were of age, there was no coercion, the question of a grade didn’t really enter into the equation. Why not, after class, have a beer or two, and then slip down Highway 1—famous for its motels that rent by the hour, not the day—and have a good time?

I hate to say it, but there’s some stuff you just don’t do. What about Raf, sitting at home, wondering where I am? What about me, washing up afterward, feeling guilty and stupid? What about the student, who I will see in two days—how’s that class gonna go?

There was, in fact, a student who put the make on me. “You have beautiful eyes,” he told me, and went on to ask my home phone number. I ignored both the comment and the question, and Ofelia transferred him to a female teacher.

OK—so I read the article. The question, it seems, is both whether pedophilia is harmful to the victim / recipient and whether the perpetuator / predator can change.

Now then—I am technically a victim of pedophilia, since I was 17-and-a-half when my uncle put the make on me. And of course I went along with it—I didn’t know any other gay men, I couldn’t imagine that there were other gay men, this was probably going to be the only sex I would have in my life.

Yes, that’s how naïve I was.

Which may be the issue I have with it. It is, on the face of it, silly to assume that something happens on the eve of an 18^th birthday, and that the child who is vulnerable and prone to predation goes to bed and wakes up an adult capable of making mature decisions. Silly—but also necessary. And we make the same arbitrary judgments about drinking, driving, and going off to war.

Now then—did it harm me, that tryst in a public park with an older man, my uncle?

At the time I felt no, later I felt yes, now I’m not sure.

However much I “consented,” it can’t be said that we were both equal partners. He was older, smarter, and wore the mantle of an adult. I was a kid—and a pretty stupid one.

Not like Raf, who takes a very different view of the pedophile cases. In Latin culture, you assume the priest is gay. And your big brother tells you—Padre Pablo is gonna put the make on you, if you let him. So he touches you anywhere, or tries to, you come to me, and I’ll deal with him.

To Raf, it’s as inconceivable that a kid wouldn’t know that the priest was gay as a kid growing up in the country not knowing about sex. I mean, you live on a farm—what do you see all day? A lot of animals humping.

So he doesn’t buy it—the trauma, the anguish, the life-long effects of betrayal and pain.

It may be a cultural thing. Whatever effect the “victimization” had on the 17 year-old Marc, it certainly wouldn’t have been the same if I had been seven. I was traumatized in second grade by having library fines I couldn’t pay—how would I have reacted to knowing that I had done something bad, evil, something I could never tell anyone? And something that I couldn’t stop, and that would happen again?

So yeah—I like my life simple. It’s easier to tell the truth, and not have to remember a lie. It’s simpler to keep your dick in your pants unless you’re with your spouse, in which case…whee! And at Wal-Mart, I worried when inadvertently I walked home with a pen that I had absentmindedly stuck in my shirt pocket. Am I gonna lose my job over a “stolen” pen?

But here’s my question—when did we decide that a compulsion / behavior that you cannot stop becomes an “orientation?” I freely grant that most pedophiles return to their pedophile behavior. But if some men are serial rapists, is rape a sexual orientation? All the guys who have a fetish for stiletto heels—is that a sexual orientation?

I might give you a pass on a relationship with a 17-year-old. But a seven-year-old?

No frigging way.