I Was Raped as a Young Boy, by "Zuhair" (original) (raw)

It seems appropriate to give a plain and blunt title to this story. Unlike most others in this collection, the suffering it reveals is not counterbalanced by any positive or nourishing relationships, as is the case with most of the other testimonials. If anything, it is counterbalanced by the strength and courage of the young man who tells this tale. It is an unvarnished, graphic account of the rape of a young teenage boy by a schoolmaster in his town. Reading it plunges us into the culture of predatory pederasty that sadly has a pedigree every bit as long as the noble pederasty that most of these stories depict to a greater or lesser extent. The account hints at the climate of horror and repression that lurks below the surface of every society. For we should make no mistake, we should in no way imagine that this pathology is one that infects only “other” cultures. It is ubiquitous, as we can read almost every day in the pages of national newspapers all over the world. Whether the boy is raped and murdered, or only raped and blackmailed into keeping quiet, what we are witness to is a universal and timeless crime. The Greeks fought against this crime, as shown by the case of the Athenian miller who imprisoned a boy in his millhouse, keeping him there for his carnal pleasure. Once discovered, the pederastic Athenians put the miller to death. The Romans were guilty of the crime as well, the high and the low, without doubt. Was Sporus not castrated for Nero’s pleasure, and did the boy not take his own life in the end? And need we parade here that endless line of victims, the altar boys abused by Christian priests under cover of the sacristy? And, finally, in light of such doings, can anyone be surprised at the odium and infamy that surrounds all pederasty these days, a time of general ignorance about the natural emotions of men and boys when only the ugly face of pederasty is visible in public because the beautiful face can not be shown?