The Boy Lover As A Safety Net

The Boy Lover As A Safety Net For Attachment Disordered Boys

Jay Edson

In this informal essay, based largely on my own experiences, I share a few of my thoughts regarding the social significance of boy-lovers. I had a fairly diverse work life. I ran a cottage of juvenile delinquents (ages 10 to 14) for several years. For a while I had an administrative position in a therapeutic foster care program. I saw disturbed boys and girls in play therapy. I took groups of boys on Upward-Bound-like adventures. And I worked with two different treatment centers for adolescents. All this is to say I know something about attachment disordered boys from first-hand experience. But in addition to my own experience I have included a few carefully selected citations that support my overall point of view.

Let me begin by saying what is meant by an “attachment-disordered boy.” I’ll keep it simple. An attachment-disordered boy is a boy who has failed to form meaningful and deep emotional and spiritual attachments with other human beings. If you want a more scientific definition leave out the word “spiritual.” Scientists don’t believe in that sort of thing. It is a part of their faith that nothing higher than matter and random chance exist in the whole universe. Suit yourself on that one. But to get back my main point: by close observation, a variety of psychologists during the early part of the 20^th century came to the conclusion that the hierarchy of fundamental motivations in human beings, and to some extent in some other animals as well, was not limited to sex, food, freedom from pain and staying alive, but also included forming intense love attachments^l. One early investigator by the name of Harry Harlow observed that when young monkeys were deprived of their mothers they clung to wire substitutes. He noticed that the baby monkeys preferred the maternal surrogates be covered with cloth. They wanted to cuddle with something soft. He also noticed that when they were deprived of real cuddling opportunities they didn’t develop properly. For example, they didn’t become proficient at sex.

Another important early investigator, named John Bowlby, called the phenomenon of forming strong emotional attachments – usually but not always with one’s own species – “bonding” and he argued that this was as fundamental as sex or food as a basic motivator of behavior.

A separate but related school of thought that emphasizes the need for positive relationships developed in the psychoanalytic tradition. This school was called, perhaps somewhat ironically, “object relations theory.” (The “objects” were people.) Thinkers in this school (Harry Guntrip being my favorite) emphasized the importance of positive relationships with other human beings from the beginning of the developmental process.

The very existence of a self appears to emerge out of relationships with others. Some descriptions of early development that I found convincing and helpful were “The First Year of Life” by Rene Spitz and “The Magic Years” Selma Fraiburg. These thinkers emphasized the centrality of relationships with others for the emotional health of both children and adults.

In one of the clinics where I worked, each week we did an extensive evaluation of a different family with problem children. Theses evaluations made it clear that most serious behavior problems had their origins in family structures that were not conducive to the development of loving, mutually sustaining relationships between family members. The children that grew up in these families had  little capacity for finding, developing and maintaining important relationships. These are the“attachment disordered” children about whom I am speaking.

When in these weekly evaluations I found children who were doing fairly well despite growing up in seriously dysfunctional families I learned to look for a positive relationship with an adult outside the immediate family with whom the child did have a mutually sustaining relationship. It might be a teacher, an uncle, a scout leader, a neighbor, a grandmother, or whatever. The person simply had to be relatively together him or herself and take a strong interest in the child. The children had a rather amazing capacity to use relationships with these people to fulfill their developmental needs.

This brings us the the central point I wish to make in this little essay. One of the main safety nets that was once available to boys who were developing into attachment disordered adults has been taken away. This is the homosexually inclined “pedophile.” I hesitate to use that poisonous “p” word, which is why I put it in quotes. But by my use of the term here I simply mean an adult male who is attracted to pubescent or prepubescent boys more than most people are. It says nothing about whether the man has had, or has sought, a sexual relationship with a boy, or whether he is attracted to people of other genders and ages as well. Perhaps the simple term “boy-lover” is a better choice. Many of the men I knew who fit this description were especially attracted to boys who had entered into the transition period between childhood and adulthood, and that they liked being around them and interacting with them.

Boys with attachment disorders tend to have more than their share of problems. They have trouble getting along with others, are frequently angry and depressed, are prone to running into legal problems with their societies, and often engage in dangerous behaviors in order to find some relief from a pervasive sense of boredom. But perhaps their most serious problem is their lack of empathy with other people, and for other species as well. It is not unusual for an attachment disordered child to be found torturing animals. All sorts of therapies have been tried with them, mostly with little success. Behavior modification techniques may be of some use, at least if strong rewards and punishments can be applied, but they produce few reliable and long lasting effects. Certainly drugs offer no cure, though attachment disordered people are frequently drawn to street drugs in the hope that they will lessen their unhappiness. The only real cure is a loving relationship. The problem is that they tend to alienate others and to have trouble finding others who genuinely love them. What I am referring to as the homosexual pedophile (or simply “boy-lover”) is willing to put up with a lot more grief from the attachment disordered boy because he derives greater satisfaction than most men do from in-depth relationships with boys once they are formed.

One of the interesting things I learned while I supervised a cottage of 25 to 30 pubescent delinquents was that they were surprisingly responsive to any genuine offer of loving attention. I loved them and that was obvious. For all the head-aches they gave me I loved being with them. Every day when I first arrived we would sit down together and talk about the good and bad things that had happened so far that day, and we would discuss the best way of solving whatever problems they had experienced. All this apparently contradicted the whole idea of their being attachment disordered. But I did not allow myself to be pushed away by their unsocialized behavior. I loved them and in only a little time that love was reciprocated. Together we developed a culture of trust and love. That was why one very ordinary person was able to manage a cottage of 25 to 30 unruly “juvenile delinquents.” (I put that I quotes because with me they were not juvenile delinquents.)

But that responsiveness to loving attention lasted only up to a certain age. If a loving adult had not reached them by the time they were 15 or 16 something closed down. They were unlikely to be reached after that. The exact age at which this closing down happens varies from boy to boy – but I could tell when it happened. If a person wanted to form an in-depth relationship with a boy, he or she had to catch them before they closed down. That at any rate was my experience.

No longer is it possible for deep love relations to develop between boys and men. This is most unfortunate because the boy-lover, or if you prefer, the homosexual pedophile frequently provided corrective emotional experiences for attachment-disordered boys. In order to understand why this kind of relationship is no longer available we need to a brief look at the Satanic Panic of the 1980s.

In 1998 I wrote an article about the satanic panic – a phenomenon about which I had considerable first hand information from my work. The article was called “Interpreting the Satanic Legend.” It was published in the fall of 1998 in The Journal of Religion and Health. It is available in my blog, uryourstory.org. I wrote in part:

When psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder undertook the treatment of a client named Michelle Smith, he became persuaded that the appalling and bizarre stories that emerged in the course of therapy -- stories of being tortured at the hands of a Satanic cult -- were not fantasies, but literal truth. The book that they wrote together, "Michelle Remembers," sounded the alarm. The modern war against Satanic cults was launched.¹

As the Pazder book became better known, a significant number of other women, all over the country, began telling similar tales, and I had the occasion to work with several of them. For a while I half believed that Pazder was right, but I wasn’t sure. My policy was to listen sympathetically and try to find evidence that would convince me that these stories were definitely fact or fantasy. The stories seemed impossible, but I told myself that if I had been in Hitler’s Germany, I would not have believed the Holocaust stories. They were just too bizarre. People did not act that way. Yet the stories of the people being incinerated in the ovens were true. So perhaps the same could be true in this case.

The basic claim was that large numbers of otherwise normal appearing adults, many of them pillars of society, gathered together in obscure places where, in the name of Satan, they committed unspeakable crimes against children. The alleged crimes included forcing children to eat feces and to kill other children as sacrifices to Satan. It was also claimed that  children were raped, mutilated and tortured in various ways. Many of the stories focused on daycare centers. 

Finally I encountered some facts that persuaded me there was no need for uncertainty. The Satanic stories were fantasies that therapists encouraged through hypnosis. Realizing this, of course, forced me to take a more skeptical approach to what my clients told me. My skepticism was not well received and I was taken off any cases dealing with Satanic matters.

In due time scholarly articles and books were written that made it clear that hypnosis was not a reliable means of retrieving memories that had been suppressed due to their traumatic nature.² Perfectly innocent people had been sent to prison – convicted of heinous crimes that not only did not happen, but that could not have happened, as they would in many cases have defied the laws of psychology, physiology and perhaps physics.  As hypnotic and quasi-hypnotically retrieved stories were  the primary source of “information” about the supposed Satanic practices, reliable professionals in the mental health field stopped believing in the fantastic stories, and among informed people the whole thing was written off as a moral panic.

In the mainstream press there had been a tremendous amount of coverage about the supposed Satanic activities. It was good that reputable scholars had, in due time, been able to clarify what was fact and what was fiction. The problem is that corrective information received very little attention in the main-stream press. It wasn’t nearly as headline grabbing as were the stories of Satanic cults imposing violent sex on children. The images of reality highlighted in the Satanic Panic, along with their accompanying attitudes, continued to dominate our culture. Many of these images and attitudes were extremely damaging to society and especially to males. In effect society was re-structured and the restructuring was maintained as though the beliefs associated with the Satanic panic had not been refuted.

I think for significant change to happen regarding an attachment problem the power of Eros must be a part of the equation. That doesn't mean that there has to be explicit sexual behavior. But that factor that creates a feeling of “in-loveless” must be operating in the relationship. Something along this line was described as early as Plato in the Symposium and in Phaedrus. By “in loveness” I mean that factor in the relationship that gives life a magical quality. And this, finally, brings us the the main point of this personal reflection: it is being in love that has the power to provide healing to an attachment disordered child. And because of that, up to the 1980s the boy lover had a special role in society. He was a safety net for boys who failed to bond deeply enough in their early years and who therefore suffered from one extent or another from attachment disorder. The need for such relationships was intuitively understood in the society. Among other things this understanding led to the creation of the “Big Brothers” program. But the primary supporters of the truth of the satanic panic claims were militant feminists and evangelical Christians. It is not surprising that one of the main beliefs that was emphasized by the feminists was that men could not be trusted to be alone with children, including boys. Therefore all of the main social locations in which men and boys could previously have had contact were diminished or removed. The Boy Scouts organization was destroyed, as was the Big Brothers program. There were very few men teaching in elementary school. lt was simply too dangerous. And any other opportunity for love relationships to develop between men and boys ended primarily because of  the sex abuse panic of the 1980s. 

In due time the quasi-psychotic nature of this panic became clear. It became clearly established that the retrieval of “memories” that had been forced into repressive forgetfulness by trauma was not possible. Things simply didn’t work that way. Hypnosis was not a reliable means of retrieving repressed memories. And it also became clear that many of the events described in the context of exposing suspected Satanists were not simply improbable, but quite impossible.

The central thesis of this little essay is that boy lovers function as a safety net for boys. By this I mean that, if a boy has found somebody in his environment with whom he can form a deep and life giving bond, he has one last chance. He can find himself in a mutually desired love relationship with an older male. You can find such a relationship described in two narratives on the uryourstory.org website: “In Defense of Intergenerational Love” under “Classics,” and “Marcus and Me,” under “Novels – Boy Love.” It is no exaggeration to say that for a boy to find himself in such a relationship may be a life-saving event. Attachment disordered boys frequently die early either due to reckless behaviors or out and out suicide. If not life saving finding the benign male lover is minimally a profound healing experience. Through it the boy is brought into the social world of human beings.

I am assuming in my remarks about the healing effects of a man/boy love that the man is acting in a way that takes into account the needs of the boy. Of course, any type of love relationship is likely to be healing. There is nothing special about love between a boy and a man. The love of boys is not, for example, inherently evil, any more than the love of women is. Boy love is good or bad – that is to say beneficial of harmful – for the same reasons any other kind of love relationship is good or bad. Do the people treat each other with respect? Does each actually will the well-being of the other, as opposed to simply possessing the other? Do they avoid engaging in activities that are harmful? Etc.

A safety net for those who run into developmental difficulties is especially needed these days when everybody considers it beneath their dignity to actually raise kids. The children are often left for the most part either with grandparents or with strangers. Often these are people whose heart is not in their work and the babies and young children are left with nobody with whom to bond. The outcome is an increase in attachment disturbed children. This problem is intensified but the increasing instability of marriages in our society, which leaves a lot of single parents who have the impossible task of both working at one and maybe two jobs while caring for the children without help. This plus the endless male-bashing that has become so much a part of our culture has made it very difficult for boys to develop a positive identity and satisfying relationships with same-sex role-models. I believe that one of the outcomes of this lack of a psycho/social safety net is the increase in multiple murders perpetrated by older teenagers and young men. In this activity they become important people who are noticed and they express their rage at a world that is indifferent to their needs. If one looks at graphs showing the rise of multiple murders by adolescents and young men it is of interest that the rise seems to begin in the 1980s when the Satanic Panic, with its perception of perceived devastating sex abuse in all spheres where men and boys might interact, made it almost impossible for a boy to find a man who would love him. It seems almost certain that an increase in suicide among adolescent and children has similar causes.

If the Columbine murders were a one of a kind evert we could rest assured that however horrible it was we would be unlikely to see such an event again. But this is not the case. Multiple murders are on the rise as are severe depression, suicide and poor school performance. I believe that the primary cause of all of these difficulties is that boys suffer from a love deficiency. Being the mechanistic society that we are we will try to cure all these problems, both the very serious and the less serious, with drugs and behavior modification. But I would expect little success in these methods. The only thing that can cure a lack of love is love.

1.With regard to the concept of “moral panics,” expecially as it pertains to the Satanic events of the 1980s, see these two books:

Goode, E. and Ben-Yehuda, N., Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994.

Nathan, D and Snedeker, M., Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt. New York: Basic Books, 1995 p.2.

2. For an in depth evaluation of whether hypnosis can provide us with dependable information regarding memories that were repressed because of trauma, here are two excellent sources:

Loftus, E. and Ketcham, K., The Myth of Repressed Memory. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994, p.14.

Ofshe, R and Waters, E, Making Monsters: False Memories Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria.