On the Historical Ordinariness of Pederasty

At the New York Public Library, the archive fever hit. There Cleves read Douglas’s transcriptions of the travel diaries of Giuseppe “Pino” Orioli. A companion of Douglas, Orioli also lived in Florence in the 1920s and 1930s. Pino’s diaries of their time together do not sanitize Douglas’s sexual encounters with children. Instead, they made his sexual practices explicit. “Orioli’s diaries are unique because they give firsthand accounts of adult–child sexual practices that are graphic but not pornographic,” Cleves writes. “Instead of fantasies of virile handsome men and beautiful willing boys, the diaries describe the men’s impotency, the boys’ pimples, and the crude commercial calculations involved in the majority of their sexual encounters.” Later, I return to this question of fantasy. For Cleves, a vacation to Capri, a critical read of Douglas’s autobiography, and a visit to the Berg Collection convinced her “to attempt a book about Douglas. Even if,” as she contends in the introduction, “it was doomed to become more kindling on the bonfire of earlier failures.” Given that our assignment here is to reflect upon and think carefully about Unspeakable — the winner of the 2021 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize — this prediction, and not the book itself, missed the mark. To be sure, not all will be happy that a book on the history of pederasty or pedophilia, a subject seen in 2022 as so distasteful and disgusting that scholars and publishers alike have kept their distance. However, as Unspeakable convincingly and brilliantly demonstrates, if we are to take the work of doing the history of sexuality seriously, we must critically engage with sex in all its forms and histories. This means, then, while we may not like a book like Unspeakable that gives pederasty a history — especially one that argues for its historical ordinariness up to the mid-decades of the twentieth century — one thing ought to be obvious: as a piece of history, Cleves’s life history of Douglas is no flaming failure. Yet as if to demonstrate the historiographical conundrum in which Cleves researched and wrote about Douglas and the seventy years he had sex with children, the two-paragraph-long citation penned by the Ferguson prize committee did not even include the word pederasty. The closest the committee’s citation came to acknowledging the subject focused on Cleves’s predicament “in telling this story about intergenerational sex.” Whether intentional or not, to leave unnamed the very history of pederasty at the heart of Unspeakable that made it worthy of praise for its “archival work spanning many types of documents and places, its pioneering use of children’s letters, its layered appeals to theory and secondary sources, and its smart, sensitive, elegant writing” in the first place, makes visible the sexual dangers (and, one might also argue, opportunities) that lie outside the charmed circle. The point here is that Unspeakable is not a failed Douglas biography. It is an award-winning history of the social world of pederasty and deserves to be acknowledged as such. A sexual history so unspeakable yet so well documented — as Cleves shows in this reluctant biography — is more taboo in the twenty-first century than in the twentieth. As such, Unspeakable is not entirely safe from becoming kindling. The book’s very queerness may yet be fuel for book-burning fires, especially in those parts of the United States of America where books are again being banned and sexual and gender nonconformists made outlaws. So — to the author, thank you for writing Unspeakable; to the University of Chicago Press, thank you for publishing it; and to the Canadian Historical Association, thank you for recognizing …