marcscoutsm
Chuck was a handsome man. He was dark, (Italian), with curly dark hair. He was 28, and I was 11. Chuck was a Boy Scout counselor at Camp Waubeeka, in upstate New York, and he molested me.
In French, "molester" means "to bother," and this is appropriate, because more than traumatizing, or scarring me, the whole experience more accurately "bothered" me. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t hate it, either. But I knew it wasn’t right. And I don’t mean in the moral sense, although it certainly wasn’t in that regard. I mean in the sense that it was wholly inappropriate, for the simply reason that I was pre-pubescent, and incapable as such of giving my free consent as an adult.
But neither was I a completely passive participant. To be honest, I seduced Chuck. I just did not know I was doing so.
I was on Chuck like white on rice, from the moment I met him. I suppose you could ascribe it to hero worship, something most boys; whether they turn out straight or gay, succumb to. But even if my sexual orientation was not yet fully articulated, it was unquestionably nascent. I fantasized constantly about getting kidnapped, tied up and gagged. The fantasy gave me an erection, and when I became an adult, I discovered that a veritable cottage industry blossomed in both the gay and straight world around this very fantasy. The kidnappers always were men, and always wore leather. It was my deep, dark secret, in a Wonder Years world where such secrets of adult sexuality were successfully hidden from children.
I was taught, like every other kid, not to talk to strangers. I was not taught about inappropriate touching, that I can remember, although of course I knew what it was when it occurred. What caused me so much torment was my inability to reconcile my discomfort and my pleasure. It was, and still is, completely taboo to acknowledge that in any way some children, specifically boys, might play a role in choosing their molester. This does not by one whit absolve the adult from his responsibility to respect the person of the child. It merely notes that children have a sexuality too, and it can play a role in the dynamic of the encounter.
Obviously Chuck was delighted to have this doe-eyed 11-year old holding on to his every word. He loved to toss me over his shoulder and tickle me. He dubbed me "Frenchie," giving me status among the boys with a nickname. Little could I understand that this was part and parcel of his modus operandi, which manifested itself particularly nefariously my second weekend at camp.
Every year, Chuck would construct a huge teepee outside of the main camps, where three different Boy Scout troupes had their tents pitched. He would gather a chosen few from each troupe, in retrospect, the best-looking boys from each. Then we would dress up in loincloths and compete in games and conduct rituals.
One such activity was footraces. Before we could run, however, Chuck would call each one of us into the teepee, and explain quite naturally that in order to avoid chafing, it was necessary to apply lotion to our scrotums. I doubt any of us were entirely comfortable with this procedure, but we didn’t talk about it amongst ourselves. I can’t imagine any child of this era not hearing alarm bells if such a wholly bogus precaution as this were taken by his camp counselor, but it was 1970. We didn’t know any better, and Chuck knew it.
We ran the races, and then Chuck took some of us to the lake and photographed us in our loincloths. I still have the picture, we he actually sent to me that autumn. It is a beautiful black and white photograph that only did I later realize probably circulated among a circle of pedophiles for years.
That night, Chuck had all of our sleeping bags circling a fire in the teepee. He made certain mine was next to his. He then started telling stories about being a marine in Okinawa. They were not very good stories, as I remember, but we were boys and he had been a marine. It didn’t matter what he said.
I remember leaning back in my sleeping bag, listening. Chuck took advantage of the way in which the sleeping bags were bunched up to quietly slide his hand into my sleeping bag. He knew—no doubt from experience—that the sheer brazenness of his gesture protected him from my saying anything. He was the authority figure, and he used this power.
He took my penis into his hand, and started manipulating it. I could scarcely believe it was happening, but instinctively said nothing. And suddenly I was erect, and while what he was doing scared me, it felt good. Soon enough I had my very first orgasm. I had no semen to ejaculate, but it was an orgasm nonetheless. But no so powerful that I could not quell my spasms.
Finally it was time to sleep. The fire was put out and we settled in. As the breathing of the other boys turned steady, I heard my sleeping bag being slowly unzipped. Chuck arms quietly surrounded me.
Part of me, a substantial part of me, was very drawn to Chuck, and wanted the affection, the attention, the physical contact. Another part of me, a bigger part of me, knew unquestionably that this was exactly why our parents warned us against talking to strangers. I was scared. I just didn’t understand sex. I didn’t think he would hurt me, and he was in no way menacing, there was just something so clearly inappropriate about what he was doing. It was as if someone was trying to speak to me in a language I didn’t understand. I had no tools with which to understand him.
My body stiffened, and Chuck did not press. But he did not take away his arms either, until I finally whispered. "Please, stop." It is hard to be certain what he said, 35 years later, but in my mind his words were "this happens too easy." And then he withdrew to his own sleeping bag.
I slept poorly, trying to understand what had happened. It seems odd now, but I had never grasped "molesting" as being specifically sexual in nature. The masturbation (which I had not yet even attempted on my own) bothered me less than the attempt at—what, snuggling? One seemed almost like an attempt to teach me pleasure, the other crossed the line into an intimacy I had no way of absorbing,
The next morning, Chuck woke us up by emptying us out of our sleeping bags and pulling off our underwear to squeals of embarrassment. This still seemed to fall under the rubric of good-natured hazing. (Extraordinary, isn’t it?)
One of the boys who were emptied from his sleeping bag was Donnie Graham. Donnie was one of my brother’s best friends, two years older than I was, and in my scout troop. I cornered him later at our campsite.
"Donnie" I told him. "Chuck molested me."
"He what? He did not. What are you talking about?"
"He played with me." (I did not even know the term "jerking off" yet.) "He put his hands in my sleeping bag."
Donnie did not know quite how to react. But he eventually told my brother, I think, who told my father, who was a scoutmaster himself, though not at the camp that year. But my father didn’t find out until I was back home.
He asked me what had happened, without particular urgency or fanfare, and I told him vaguely about fondling. Later my mother asked me about it as well, in a manner that made clear that she wanted to hear that it was no big thing, Embarrassed to talk to my mother about such things, I said whatever needed to be said to terminate the conversation as quickly as possible.
This is what my parents were like. When my brother was 4, he got up on the bathroom sink, and put his foot in the basin. Amazingly, the basin broke, and his leg plunged through it, tearing a huge gash in his leg. He was rushed to the emergency room and sewn up. In the middle of the operation, the surgeon took a phone call. When he returned he completed suturing.
Four years later, Luke started limping, and went back to our regular doctor. There was something pointy sticking out from the inside of his leg. It turned out to be a needle. The surgeon, evidently, had returned from the phone call and continued the stitching with a different needle. The needle he left in my brother’s leg could have traveled to his heart.
My parents had a lawsuit that could have financed my brother’s medical school tuition years later. Instead, they wrote a letter to the AMA. I wonder if it even got into his file.
And so, my non-litigious–to-a-fault father merely made a phone call asking that Chuck’s contract the following summer not be renewed. And yet, that December, we returned to Waubeeka for a winter weekend in a cabin, with Chuck as one of the accompanying adults. Since my father was with us, there was of course no opportunity for Chuck to misbehave. The only time my father talked about it again was when he joked one or two years later about my "homosexual days." I scowled, all the more because I was becoming aware that those days were ahead of me much more than behind me.
I am certain the experience had no bearing on my homosexuality. I have no doubt that sexual orientation is fixed from birth, like left-handedness. I do wonder where and how pedophilia emerges. I assume Chuck was himself molested, as, in my understanding, sexual abuse begets sexual abuse. And yet I myself have absolutely no inclinations in that regard. I am attracted to men, not boys, and never have been otherwise for a moment.
As such, I was attracted to Chuck, the man, though in an inchoate way. The memory of the experience with him does not make me recoil. It even retains an erotic tinge, although not something I ever fantasize about. (Because in my fantasies, I am also a man.) Above all I remember the fear. I simply did not understand why he was doing what he was doing,
I imagine that if I was born ten years later, and I had met Chuck in 1979, that he would not have been so brazen. But had it occurred nonetheless, it is hard to imagine my parents reacting with such equanimity. In those ten years, we were introduced to Phil Donahue, Sally Jesse Raphael and Oprah. Ten year olds had a much better understanding of why it was one didn’t talk to strangers. And yet, as with most pedophiles, Chuck was not a stranger, He was entrusted with the care of boys whose parents worried much more about them falling from capsized canoes than being fondled. His behavior was certainly indefensible.
And yet, I’m glad my parents didn’t press charges. I think that experience would have been much more traumatic for me than the actual encounter with Chuck was. But certainly, this sort of thing occurred with many boys over many years. I cannot say for sure if the fact that I am gay, and was even then, makes the difference in how I digested the experience. But I imagine it does. It also begs a certain question. Did Chuck choose me because I chose him?
This doesn’t in any way minimize Chuck’s conduct. It only lends perspective to the big picture. If children were generally understood to be little people, with appetites that are not fully developed, but there, they might also be empowered to see themselves as more capable of saying no. When I did say no, Chuck respected that.
I think this is so controversial because a child who feels capable of saying no is also a child who feels capable of saying yes. I’ve known many men, over the years, who told me that as boys they actually searched out men for sex. They initiated the encounters. I remember myself pressuring and cajoling the Good Humor Ice Cream truck driver to let me drive around with him, hidden behind the door where he served the ice cream. In retrospect, he let me do it almost certainly because he was attracted to me. He did not act on it, but why did I want so badly to be driven around in his truck?
Part of it was because it was forbidden, and I was such a good kid I got a rush from doing something "bad." But part of it was that I liked looking at him, I liked the way his exposed forearms turned the wheel, his deep voice as he asked, "What’ll you have?"
To a pedophile who no doubt suffers terribly from the urges he certainly did not choose to have and cannot control having, such seductive behavior (however unconscious it was on my part) must have made not acting on it all the more difficult. It could easily have fed the delusion on his part that any sexual interaction would have involved mutual consent.
Of course, there can be no informed consent, by definition, from a ten-year old, and any violation of that reality must be discouraged and sanctioned against by society. But I think, between certain boys and certain men, that it is not as completely black and white a picture as it is commonly portrayed. Sexuality does not arise fully formed at puberty. It grows from year to year until it bursts forth, like a chick from an egg. But it evolves along a continuum.
If I had recounted this story as a ten-year old having a sexual encounter with an older woman, the reaction would probably be more one of being amazed by my precocity than that of wondering if I was traumatized by the event. I heard more than a few of those stories in prison, they exist in literature as well, and it is never associated with a sense of shame or victimization on the part of the boy. If anything, there is a triumphant-young-stud veneer to it.
Frankly, nothing in my experience itself was inherently traumatic. It was sexual, not violent, and there was never any real or implied threat of violence. This doesn’t make Chuck’s behavior okay, but I can’t say I think he should have gone to prison for it either.
I don’t know any more than anyone the best way to deal with pedophiles. I just think they are too easily simplified and reduced to demon predators, and the object of their attraction as having no capacity for attraction themselves. It’s simply more complicated than that.
(None of my conjectures apply to older men and girl children, by the way. I believe my experience was entirely a function of the nature of male sexuality, which I think differs fundamentally from female sexuality. If I were a girl fondled by an older man I would be hard fit to see it as anything but pure and simple victimization.)
I actually searched for Chuck when I was 15, and became aware of my attraction toward men. I knew he lived in the Bronx, but his last name was too common to isolate him. Ironically, I would probably have been too old for him by then anyway.
What a curse it must be to have such desires as he did. I imagine if I could not wish or pray away my own sexual urges toward men, that he could no more do the same of his for boys. What a terrible burden to live with, like perpetually trying to drive though a dead end road.
It may be the ultimate in political incorrectness to have compassion for such souls, but I do.
MCO 2005