I lusted and instigated more than most

William Percy has published several books on the history of homosexuality. He tells of his childhood.

Source: Memoirs, Draft of the Early Chapters, by William A. Percy, undated


Excerpts:

Chapter 2. Memphis

Daddy also bragged, to me and others when I was five or six, about how at age three I had beat up the grandson of General Bullington, Jimmy Walker, who, though younger than I, was bigger. He also was husky, blond, and adorable. I presumed that Daddy liked to tell the story because he worried about my masculinity; I was small for my age and exceedingly unathletic. I remembered not the fight with Jimmy but my strong sexual attraction to him, which I spent much time wondering how to express. Ultimately I decided that expressing it would not be socially acceptable. When Jimmy moved away with his family to the suburbs I felt tragically deprived.

Chapter 7. Yarboroughs, the Wildest of Them All

I was left to my own devices in the studio for stretches of time, and wasn’t having any sex. To compensate I developed an autoerotic relationship with my reflection in the mirror of Lady’s wardrobe. When bored with that, I loitered among the apricot trees of the courtyard garden, hoping boys or young men would give me come-hither glances. None did, of course. I looked even more juvenile than my scant ten years.

Chapter 8. More Playmates

Between infancy and adolescence, that is, what we call childhood from age six to twelve, Freudians maintain that children repress their sexuality, meaning that they quit doing it. This was not the case with me nor indeed with most of the boys in my neighborhood. Some participated more frequently and enthusiastically than others. One boy declined, and he was the most undersized. We all wondered why he didn’t. I lusted and instigated more than most and unlike some of them never regretted that Little Nellie didn’t join in our games.

Chapter 9. Middlesex

This is not a pun. Some do indeed quip that if you can’t get a girl, get a Middlesex boy – types that in gay slang are called “twinkies”. It’s the name of Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, then still a Brahman bastion which admitted one boy each year from the South for diversity. That was me in 1948. There I boarded from ages fourteen to seventeen, during my early adolescence. Although I only had sex with one boy there once on the night before graduation, it was during these years that I first began having furtive casual sex, one-night stands with adults, preferring soldiers, sailors, and marines, although I often sought out non-uniformed lower-class males in sites where I thought that I would not be observed.


UMASS professor advocates pederasty

Source: UMASS professor advocates pederasty, Associated Press, November 26, 2000

“I never got enough sex with an older man. I don’t see that I was harmed at all, except being deprived of not having more. I was already the aggressor.”