Fair-Haired Boys

 

I have written recently my speculations about what turned my mentally-retarded Uncle “Tom” into a bisexual pedophile. I have traced it back through circumstantial evidence to my Uncle Teddy as prime suspect. Both are dead, so I trust there is no harm now in speaking openly.

But there was another child who might have been involved. My father. Call him Terry. He was at least two years younger than Teddy, at least one year older than Tom. Was he aware of what was going on? Was he affected?

There is no obvious sign of it. If Ted’s bachelorhood suggests homosexuality, Terry’s life suggests the reverse. He married and had five children. As far as I can tell, he was always faithful to my mother. He never disappeared for an evening, unless it was for a Rotary Club meeting. Perfectly conventional.

Yet it is improbable that he was oblivious to it all. And I have again some circumstantial evidence that he was involved.

Back in his early adolescence, my brother was caught with a little book titled Sex for One: a manual of masturbation. Not abnormal for his age; I had a copy of Southern and Hoffenberg’s Candy hidden in my own drawers at about that time. It too was found, and confiscated; but the only feedback I heard was that my mother had read it. She gave no review.

But our father really seemed upset with my brother about that book. He ragged on him quite a bit, as if to humiliate him.

This was strange.

It was not for moral reasons. My father was no sexual prude nor moralist. When, in earlier childhood, he was given reports of his sons and daughter exposing themselves to one another in the attic, he said nothing and did nothing. He did not seem to care. When his wife and children, and the next-door neighbour, complained that his brother, Uncle Tom, was molesting the children, he said nothing and did nothing.

In fact, at around the same time he found the book in my brother’s room, he was advising us, his three adolescent sons, that we should learn the ropes by having sex with our mother, or with our older married cousin, then living with us. And he advised us in a rudimentary way how to seduce a woman: you play soft music, and avoid being too obvious about it. He seemed to be coaching us, and indeed trying to tempt us. 

He got no takers, though. I doubt he ran the notion by our mother or our cousin.

Most of us have a natural revulsion to incest. Evolution instills this, to preserve the species from a shrinking gene pool.

Our father, whether he acted on it or not, clearly did not have any sense that incest was repulsive. In fact, his advice to us suggests he thought it was, on the whole, preferable to exogamy. 

The one thing, I posit, that might override this natural aversion to incest is if your first sexual encounter is incestuous. Then you are imprinted by the natural monogamy of our species with the sense that this is the proper way to have sex.

This might even explain his loyalty to our mother. It was clearly not on grounds of sexual morality or the marriage vow: he was shopping her out. But a taste for incest would flip the drive for exogamy into a drive for endogamy, and so support monogamy. If initially foreign to the family, her continued presence, in time almost like a sister, may have made her automatically sexually preferable to other women.

So it looks as though our father’s earliest sexual experiences, like Tom’s, must have been incestuous. Otherwise he would realize how gross he was sounding.

When we boys were still quite young, he gathered us for the talk on the birds and the bees. Oddly, he did this not at home, but during a visit to our grandparents. (Dr. Freud, call your office. Did being in his parents’ home make him think of such matters?) There was no talk of sexual morality, of monogamy or waiting until marriage. It was more about how wonderful sex is. He omitted any mention of venereal disease.

He did pull out his penis and show it to us—not very sexually inhibited of him.

Why did he do this? Surely it was not required for educational purposes; we all had our own dangly bits, and knew what one looked like. 

A feminist might suggest this was a power move, a man “waving his penis around.” But in my experience, men never do that in front of other men. Perhaps in front of a woman. Surveys show most men are insecure about the size of their flaccid penis. 

But then again, this was not, as I recall, a flaccid penis. It looked as though it was at least semi-erect.

Which suggests he was doing it for sexual pleasure, and further had some homosexual and pedophilic impulses. Would most men feel comfortable taking out their penis to show it to young boys? If they did, would they be likely to get an erection?

And now, if it was not for moral reasons, why did my father take exception to my brother’s book, Sex for One? Why, if all the rest of this was fine with him, was he so opposed to masturbation?

He wasn’t.

My father took exception to the book, Sex for One, not because it was about masturbation, but because, he said, it was about homosexuality. He said it meant that my brother was becoming a homosexual. I don’t recall the exact word he used. It was not “homosexual,” and it was not “gay.” That word was not in common use. 

Why would he automatically connect masturbation with homosexuality? 

It seemed to make no sense.

Yet, given how the human body is built, male homosexual sex requires mutual masturbation: first Bert brings Ernie to orgasm, then Ernie returns the favour, by some form of artificial stimulation.

That this was our father’s sole and immediate association suggests a strong familiarity with homosexual sex. It would not have occurred to me; or, I think, to most.

Does this mean he was opposed to homosexuality, or to my brother being a homosexual? Not necessarily—though he would not be the first closet gay who tried to project his own “fault” onto others. The point might just as well have been to convince my brother that he already was a homosexual. Plant the seed and see if it develops.

Most tellingly, perhaps, in helping to identify where this came from, my father also showed exactly the same preference for blonde hair we saw in Uncle Tom. He married a blonde woman. He blatantly favoured his blonde sons and daughter over the browns—something I think we all noticed, in our way. He put heavy pressure on both blonde sons to live nearby and go into business with him; which would have him see them daily. “Fair-haired boy,” meaning someone arbitrarily favoured, was even one of his pet expressions. Granted that it was a fairly familiar idiom at about the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries; but not that common. In my father’s time, I never heard anyone else use it. It seemed to speak to him in some way.

For what it is worth, my father had dark hair. He was not referring to himself admiringly, then, but to some external object of his affection. 

Uncle Ted, as previously noted, had blonde hair.

Ted probably experimented on his younger brother Terry as well as on little Tom. In either case, it had more or less the same effect. The only difference was that Terry, unlike Tom, had a social life, and was able to marry. He therefore felt less need to act out his less conventional urges--so far as I can tell.

The moral of this story is not that we must suppress homosexuality specifically. I do not hold with Freud that suppression is out of the question; but it is a heavy burden on some, imposed on them through no fault of their own. It is not even that we must suppress incest, or pedophilia, although we must. It is that we must stop viewing other people as objects, there for our pleasure, sexual or otherwise. Other people, as Kant explains, must be seen as ends, not means. They are to be treated, as Martin Luther King explains, with the respect due to the content of their character, not according to the colour of their skin or the colour of their hair or their age or their sex or their physical attractiveness, or supposed ownership because they are our children or our siblings. 

If my speculations are correct—and some of the evidence is certain--Tom, Ted, and Terry all failed this test.