Quote: As Yeo says in his interesting preface to this anthology of eighteen stories about the sexual adventures of boys together, there is probably little difference in terms of authenticity between the half of them that are memoirs (but unverifiable) and those that are fictional (but probably draw heavily on personal experience).

One might expect the fiction to be more dramatic and compelling, but if anything I found the reverse. The three best are "The Egg and I" drawn from Jack Robinson's Teardrops on My Drum about two twelve-year-old Liverpudlian lovers in 1933, "Joker's Wild" from Richie McMullen's Enchanted Youth about fifteen-year-old London rent boys in 1958, and "Peter" from James Beresford's unpublished memoir about the escalating antics of a boy aged only six when his playing doctors and nurses first extends to naughtier games. Perhaps this is an illustration of the saying that truth is stranger than fiction, for while the fictional stories tend to feel familiar, the memoirs depict rarer varieties of experience.

The main flaw with these short stories is that none of them are designed as such, and it shows. Despite Yeo's claim that they are not what is now understood as erotica because the reader is taken inside the minds of the characters, I found the shredding of context meant this was done inadequately. The least interesting fell flat, while the best left me unsatisfied and thirsting for more. Having read Teardrops, I can confirm that it at least is far more satisfying than its excerpt. The stories are fairly graphic sexually, but would have been more erotic as well as moving if one's understanding of the emotions involved had not been so truncated. A notable exception is the Indian story "Visit to Aunty's" from P. Parivaraj's Shiva and Arun, which does stand well on its own.

Looking at the stories chronologically from the third to last decades of the twentieth century, Yeo observed that before the 2nd World War boys inclined to have sex together got down to it without angst and "until the 1960s, ... it was tacitly accepted that if boys had sex in their early teens (never mind earlier), it was going to be homosex," whereas "today, children are pressed into charades of boyfriend and girlfriend even before they reach puberty, and the sex play among boys that was once innocent and normal now acquires a dangerous 'gay' connotation" and has become taboo. His devastating conclusion that the place won by gay adults has been "at the expense of the sexual freedom of boys" not only gets far too little attention, but is poorly understood now that self-fulfilling belief in the dogma of early-fixed sexual orientation is so strong.

Even this is not as depressing as the further deterioration since All Boys Together was published by which the sort of harmless and exhilarating boyish fun it depicts has also become criminalised, ruining the lives of ever more thousands of boys who unwittingly or not fall foul of the new puritan regime. Several of the memoirs in this book, most especially "Peter", with its shocking, positive depiction of pre-pubescent incest, would take considerable courage to write and publish today, and it is perhaps as a social history of barely now imaginable boyhood that it is most valuable.

   

Quote:Children are taught not to talk to strangers, but what about coaches and family friends?

The man who kidnapped me was both.

On the thirty-third anniversary of the day of my kidnapping, I awoke to Mom’s alarm clock. As irony would have it, it was not a buzzing alarm but rather the sound of a local radio show, which was accompanied by the jarring realization that I had been coaxed from my sleep by the voice of the brother of my kidnapper.

When I think about the day I was taken, the first thing that comes to my mind is the question I am asked the most: “Did you know it was going to happen?”

The answer is yes. I didn’t know when he was going to kidnap me, but he told me that he would take me somewhere. Jeff was in debt and owed someone a lot of money, and he had a pending court date. But he didn’t have the money to pay what he owed, and he had already conned most of the people he knew in town, so he was running out of options. As the date approached, he told me, “If I don’t get the money, I am going to California, and I am taking you.” That was it.

Leading to the day of the kidnapping, there were many warning signs, but soon it was too late. I was about to be kidnapped, and yet my parents had no clue. I was teetering between two worlds. A world of youth and a world of identity and adulthood, when most kids take some sort of detour. I was not unhappy to be in a car with my coach that day. But my intuition was flickering a warning light that something wasn’t quite right. I just could not pinpoint what was wrong.

That morning, it finally came to me what was happening. I knew he was going to take me, but it never occurred to me to say no or try to escape. I went willingly. Maybe because my parents let me go everywhere with Jeff, and it was the way things were, or maybe because I looked up to him and considered him a friend. My mother had no reason to have suspicions that I wouldn’t be coming home. He often dropped me off at home after karate practice. It had become routine. Everyone, including me, trusted Jeff.

When people ask me if the molestation was worse during the time we were on the run, my answer usually surprises them. It was better during the kidnapping because it did not happen as often. When he took me to California, including Disneyland, the number of times he molested me was reduced because he was stressed, and he spent most of his time worried about avoiding being captured. The mounting anxiety and threat of being captured took over his thoughts. He struggled to maintain his act as someone with a calm, loving demeanor.

Today I train parents and community leaders about the truths, dangers, and facts about how adults prey on children. We often give our trust away to someone undeserving. We judge based on behavior and positional leadership instead of taking the time to stop, evaluate, and tread more cautiously.

   

Quote:But aren’t ambiguous feelings the reality of maturity? I hope this chapter has explained the complexity of feelings I hold for a place I simultaneously hate and love. The curve of the pohutukawa as they defy gravity and lean down the cliff, the marvellously ornate veins clinging to the clay banks, the faint track through the fallen pohutukawa leaves of the old paths around the cliff edges, the somnolence of a drip falling inside the changing rooms, the raw squeak of the swings as the wind moves them about in autumn or winter, the prairie plain of Point Chevalier Road by night, when everyone is asleep and I’m still driving around the suburb looking for something lost or mislaid — all of these are veins of my personality that still pump, resoundingly, blood.
But of course there are problems trying to speak out in your own home town. My mother still lives in Auckland, though she resolutely changed her suburb when she was at long last able. (But even for her the Point remains a central reference: where we lived our family life perhaps. Our history lies there: the body of it, the pulverised bones.)
Trying to talk about your own family and personal history in this narrow context is difficult, even at times impossible. What can I say? The murmuring voices of the past say: be silent, let the pain be absolved in the great balm that is time. But time is also pressing. Although we lived ‘down the road’ from the biggest mental asylum in the country, we never for one moment considered that we had anything to do with insanity. We were sane: anyone who crossed that boundary and went in through the gates was insane. It was that stark and simple.
At times I feel like the Ancient Mariner who ‘yet must tell his tale’. Increasingly, I guess, gay men and women wish to distance themselves from the past and project an adamantine surface of sexiness and success. In this world, to look back is to risk turning, not to stone, but to the uncertain being we all once were — the unformed being, the person without the smart comeback, the one without an answer. But this is where we all started from. Most people do.
In the end, though, I think that while my story is individual, as anyone’s is, each moment of decision is a juncture in a route to an adult identity. My story is also part of a time, a place, a period. It is, in some senses, personal history, but the emphasis has to be on the second part of the equation: history.
 
As I said at the beginning, you tend to have two different viewpoints of where you grow up. My childhood view was so adhesively close to the Point and its many moods that I unthinkingly loved it. Maybe I had no choice — certainly I didn’t have much of a sense of comparison. Perhaps it’s a symptom of my advancing age that I more and more lull and return to that first view I had of the place: the Point. Is it an irony that the place I came from, the place I started out from, the place that defined me and formed me perhaps more than any other, was actually called the Point? This is what we true locals all called it anyway. Maybe in the end then this is what I learnt, what I got: I came to understand the Point.