Overview

Through the Eyes of Boys

I have been asked to write a few words to introduce the project with which I am involved, one that has been gathering first person accounts from young men in Central and South Asia. The (rather long) title of the project is, CHILDREN SPEAKING TRUTH TO LIARS: Modern Bacha Bazi Culture Through the Eyes of the Boys.

The reports we have been gathering during the course of our fieldwork consist of testimonials and surveys about the love relationships with adult men that these young men had in adolescence. What have we learned? The regions being studied are perhaps some of the last places on Earth where a culture of man-boy love, locally known as bacha bazi, boy play, has persisted to the present day. But it has persisted under cover of silence and hypocrisy. Most men there are attracted to boys, but no man will publicly acknowledge his own feelings. And the men or boys who are discovered to be in a relationship are severely punished, presumably by others that share the exact same desires. What does that mean in real terms?

It means, according to the reports that we have received, that in some areas the majority of the men and boys will have experienced one or more intergenerational love relationships. It means that in those lands the universality of men's desire for boys is a given. The only variable is that some men will enact those emotions, while others will repress them for reasons of religious fanaticism, fear of exposure, or ethical constraints. Of those men who do enter into relationships with boys, the majority, the good lovers, are regarded with love and admiration by the boys involved; the rest, the abusive ones, with hate and fear. A neutral observer will discern, respectively, patterns of love, caring and respect, as well as systematic abuse, molestation and rape. The boys who have been well treated, when asked about any harm they may have suffered, point mostly to the climate of secrecy and the fear of discovery as the principal cause.

These observations stand on their head Western notions of pedophilia as rare, or necessarily a pathology. By the same token, they reinforce the awareness that all civilized people have, that youths are vulnerable and must be protected from sexual predation by their elders. Time and time again the young people report that what they desire from a man is love, care and respect. And they are pleased to be erotically pleasured. But none desire to be penetrated. In those instances when the man does exploit the boy sexually, the boys report initial reactions of fear, disgust and repugnance, as well as excruciating pain and ulterior dysfunction. After the act, some boys report lasting aversion, others, habituation and rationalization of the abuse. One might call the latter a kind of sexual “Stockholm syndrome.”

Here is where the careful observer will discern the difference between the kind of loving that harmonizes with boys’ nature, and the kind which does not. This is a discovery rooted not in some arbitrary dogma but in privileging the self-reported emotions and actions of the young subjects. And here too is where we can discern the lineaments of the instinctive purity of these boys, a purity that it is well to love, but all too easy to desecrate.

Andrew Calimach,

Bucharest, March 28th, 2025

Additional Information On the "CHILDREN SPEAKING TO LIARS " Project.

Material excerpted from the field research project CHILDREN SPEAKING TRUTH TO LIARS: Modern Bacha Bazi Culture Through the Eyes of the Boys (Andrew Calimach, Central and South Asia, 2023–2025), used with permission of the author. All rights reserved. For more information, visit: https://independentscholar.academia.edu/AndrewCalimach/The-Silenced-Boys-Speak-Out:-Bacha-bazi-survey ")

Each entry contains an autobiographical vignette plus (with one exception) the author’s response to a questionnaire about the experience of writing the story. Although the authors were different ages at the time of writing the vignettes, the events they describe transpired while they were adolescents. Hence they give the perspective of the younger person in these kinds of relationships. I feel that this gives the stories they tell a special importance. Not since Theo Sandfort’s study, “Boys On Their Contacts with Men: A Study of Sexually Expressed Friendships” have I seen such important data. Andrew Calimach’s page contains many more such accounts, as well as provocative essays, reconstructions of ancient Greek myths, original stories, and illustrated stories.