The book itself is not great literature. There are a few fine writers of books and stories about boylove - Edmund himself among that number - but Dennis Harmon is not one of them.
It is at least readable. My real issue with it is - and I emphasise this is my own personal opinion - that I believe it to have been written by one person, presumably Dennis Harmon, who styled himself the editor. Having perforce read it carefully a couple of times, I think the style, the vocabulary, the attitudes of the four alleged first-person narrators, the progression of each encounter, the active seduction, the activities and the descriptions thereof; all of these are too much of a pattern to be what Harmon wants us to believe them to be.
I've softened that reaction a little in the last 24 hours. The book came out at a time when no one else was publishing such explicit paederastic material. Ther late 60s were when Sandel appeared, Marryn Goff's Indecent Assault was in that period too, as were The Boy and Boys will be Boys, to name but a few examples. All these were, to a greater or lesser degree, quite restrained.
Into the 70s and 80s a slew of scholarly periodicals on our subject appeared, NAMBLA was formed in the USA and PIE in England; and of course John Stanford and Frank Torey set up Coltsfoot and Acolyte Presses. It was a period of genuine optimism among activists who sincerely believed in a new dawn. I think Harmon found himself right at the beginning of this period, when no one had brought out anything like his Boy-Lovers, and he felt the need to dress it up as a work of scholarly research. Perhaps he lacked the talent to really get away with that, but he made the effort, and whatever one's reaction to this book, one can respect that effort, and the risks involved.
I'm afraid I expressed all that much more forcefully in my email to Edmund of yesterday evening, and I beg his forgiveness. I repeat what I also wrote: nothing in my response to the book then or now in any way diminishes my gratitude to him for giving me this book to work on and present to you here at TNT. I don't always choose my words carefully, a trait that has got me into trouble more than once down the years.
I should provide a warning that the book is explicit, but perhaps no more so than much of the Acolyte/Coltsfoot output, many examples of which are already available on TNT.
While preparing the ebook I concentrated almost exclusively on fixing the multitude of OCR errors, and even after two full line-by-line edits I still cannot be sure I've eliminated them all. I've done my best. As for the text, I only fixed some errors of punctuation, including apostrophes and quotation marks, and some obvious printer's errors.
All that said, I take great pleasure in presenting to you what after all is an extreme rarity. I hope many of you will add comments and opinions to this thread, and join me as I once again say a heartfelt Thank You to
Edmund Marlowe, and of course the intrepid photographer!
