From the belly of the beast

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But it's for having sex with boys that we face arrest, not for loving them. We may welcome the liberating effects our relationships have on the boys we love, as well as the material difference we can make in their lives. However these aren't our sole motives. We have sex with boys because we enjoy it, and enjoy it enough to pursue such pleasure despite the legal peril. A genuine identity for boy-lovers as political prisoners must acknowledge the pursuit of pleasure as central. We're often loath to admit that.

To be in jail for sucking dick feels shameful, and we look for a more important or idealistic or altruistic explanation. This reluctance to acknowledge the worth of sexual pleasure is a clue to its political importance. Why do we reflexively deny the sexual motive in our relationships or portray as trivial a desire we've risked so much to satisfy? Though it's among boy-lovers that desire is most conspicuously punished, it's in childhood that desire is universally proscribed. Our early experiences teach us to deny the pleasures of the body. [...]

There's a prison built inside us all that begins in the denial of pleasure. A conscious determination to indulge ourselves begins to tear it down. If that pursuit of pleasure sometimes leads to those prisons built of stone walls and iron bars, it's also the key to set us truly free.

source: Column 'From the Belly of the Beast' by 'a prisoner jailed for consensual sex with boys'; Nambla Bulletin, Vol. 12, n. 2; March 1991