Stephen Fry and His ....Boy Problem.
Stephen Fry's work has minimised the sexual abuse of under age boys. It's a reminder of a long and shameful tradition of homosexual intellectuals glorifying pederasty.
This is a story about a celebrity. Yes, it’s Stephen Fry again.
Or Sir Stephen Fry, I should say. He’s been knighted since my last post. Don’t blame me. I had nothing to do with it.
It’s also a story about unfinished business. The reason Fry deserves another, closer look is because he and his work seem to represent to me the fundamental genetic flaw in the modern gay movement. And its LGBTQ+ successor. This flaw is the failure to properly confront the movement’s problematic origins in the ideas of a small group of highly-influential 19th and early 20th Century homosexuals.
These artists, writers and thinkers, who were active between the 1870s and 1920s until their proto-movement fizzled out, called themselves ‘Uranians’. The word was inspired by Ancient Greek myth. We’ll be dipping into Ancient Greece later.
The word ‘homosexual’, which was only coined in 1869, took a long time to stick. Not least because the reference to ‘sexual’ was just a little bit too honest about the importance of ‘sex’ in the homosexual identity and not nearly hifalutin sounding enough. ‘Uranian’ by contrast cloaked itself in lots of hoo-hah about…..looorve.
Many of these … ‘Uranians’…(no sniggering at the back)… such as Oscar Wilde, John Addington Symonds and Wilhem von Gloeden continue to be lauded today, which is a mystery to me. Since the ‘Uranians’ were as sexual as can be and….whisper it gently…. their sexual identity was not so much adjacent to pederasty as completely entangled in it. So much so that the rights of those we call homosexuals today were often seen by them as inseparable from the “rights” of pederasts. Or those we call child abusers today.
Happy New Year.
I’m starting 2025 with my longest post ever. It had to be long because if we want to make sense of why prominent gay men like Sir Stephen Fry can be so infuriatingly complacent about child safeguarding we have to really grapple with the strange ideas that clutter up their minds and often shape their responses.
This post took me more than a week to research and write. I hope you agree the end result is a revealing - if sometimes shocking- guide to a hundred and fifty years of the gay movement including its guiltiest secret. One that is usually never discussed. I genuinely think my mini-history sheds light on why the LGBTQ+ movement embraced child-harm. Like puberty blockers.
If you are a free subscriber I hope you get enough out of the post before you hit the paywall. If you are able to support my work with a paid subscription I’d be really grateful. Paid subscriptions are, at the moment, my main source of income and fund my research and time.
Either way, thank you for reading this. It’s good to know I have an audience out there.
For obvious reasons the modern gay movement that emerged in the late 1960s preferred to have its cake and eat it. It hailed the example of ‘Uranian’ men (they were almost all men) as heroic while pulling a veil over their troubling ideas and even more troubling behaviour.
Yet, as therapists like to remind us, failure to acknowledge an underlying problem can end up making us more vulnerable to it. It’s my growing conviction the modern gay movement’s failure to deal with the dark intellectual legacy it inherited from the pederast-friendly ‘Uranians’ helps explain why it has ended up advancing a profoundly dangerous agenda that actively harms children.
The most damaging legacy of all from the men who made up the first proto-homosexual rights movement was their anxiety about what they saw as the great pivot point of youth: puberty. It may be no accident, in other words, that today’s LGBTQ+ lobby shares this obsession. If I’m right the obsession is a pathological expression of the genetic flaw the lobby inherited from its forbears.
And that’s where Stephen Fry comes in.
In my last post I speculated that the… focus… on adolescent boys in Stephen Fry’s work might be linked to his support for the notion children can be born in the wrong body. Both “gender affirming healthcare” (sic) and the sexualisation of adolescent boys are, after all, often marked by disgust or even dread of puberty.
As evidence I cited Fry’s play ‘Latin!’ in which a Classics teacher “befriends” a thirteen year old orphan and takes him to Morocco to sexually abuse him in what is depicted as a loving relationship. The teacher then waxes lyrical about how he never wanted to become adult himself and had always dreamed of remaining a “perfect boy”.
Some of Fry’s fans rushed to defend him using a version of the ‘don’t judge an artist by his work’ argument. And it’s true just because Fry’s fictional characters extol adult-child sexual relations doesn’t mean he does himself. Though one of my critics seemed less exercised about artistic freedom and more about my “pathetic hysteria”.
Guilty as charged.
The problem is, having now studied more of Fry’s fiction, it turns out that complacence (to say the least) about the sexual abuse of boys is a bigger theme than I had at first imagined. That complacence may not be limited to his fiction. Later in this post I will dissect a remarkable article Fry wrote in 2009. In it he cites a list of artists, many distinctly obscure- whom he considers “inspirational”. It’s astonishing that -as far as I know- until now no-one has pointed out his list is almost entirely made up of pederasts or men who defended pederasty. Or both.
I’ll start though by exploring an extraordinary novel by Fry. Its theme is perhaps even more bizarre than that of ‘Latin!’ though by some unaccountable coincidence it also involves the sexual abuse of an adolescent. And it just happens to contain many of the tropes in favour of pederasty the Uranians invented.
What are the chances?
Buckle up. We’re about to take a journey into the imagination of Stephen Fry.
It’s a disturbing place where an adolescent boy’s semen is alleged to have miraculous powers.
And where a paedophile pornographer- who procured boys for his rich friends- can be described as inspirational by a certain “national treasure” who has just been knighted.