1./ 🧵Stephen Fry and Britain's Failure to Take Child Abuse Seriously. Our headlines are dominated by the scandal of institutions that refused to protect girls for fear of seeming "racist". My latest article suggests Stephen Fry's knighthood is from the same copybook.
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2./ In a society that took child abuse seriously Stephen Fry's long track record of minimising child sexual exploitation would have disbarred him from the nation's top honour. In Fry's first play 'Latin' an adult teacher sexually abuses a 13 year old boy and takes him to Morocco.
3./ The boy writes back to his schoolmates praising the country which he claims takes a relaxed attitude to sex between men and underage boys. They petition to visit. Fry's interest in adolescent boys continues in 'Hippopotamus' in which a 15 year old has sex with adults.
4./ These abusive adults consider the sex so extraordinary they believe it has cured them of disease. There are endless descriptions by Fry of the 15 year old's naked body that culminate in a 3 page account of him having sex with a horse. I'll spare you the pornographic details.
5./ If this troubling attitude to child abuse was reserved for Fry's fiction perhaps it could be put down to some kind of dramatic license. Instead it seeps into Fry's public statements. In 2016 he told abuse victims to stop feeling sorry for themselves.
6./ He shocked a BAFTA audience with a joke that implied the appalling abuse of children by paedophile priests in the film 'Spotlight' was an example of a love theme in a movie. Where on earth does Fry get his apparent complacence about child safeguarding?
heraldscotland.com/life_style/art…
7./ In his memoir 'Moab is My Washpot' Fry revealed as an adolescent -unlike young gays today - he was inspired by the historical example of old gay men "sequestered in Capri and Tangier". Perhaps he was unaware Capri and Tangier historically were infamous bywords for pederasty.
8./ That seems unlikely if a remarkable article Fry wrote in 2009 is anything to go by. In a letter to his younger self Fry celebrated a list of 20 "queer" icons he claims inspired him as a 16 year old. Many are obscure. Only two have no link to pederasty.
theguardian.com/media/2009/apr…
9./ While huge gay icons like Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter and E M Forster are notably absent Fry includes names like Wilhelm von Gloeden whose photographs of naked adolescent Sicilian boys were all the rage at the turn of the 20th Century. Among men of a certain persuasion.
10./ Perhaps Fry is unaware Gloeden didn't just photograph boys he procured them for men. Who else is on the list Fry said "emboldens you [his 16 year old self] "to know that such a number of brilliant ...souls shared the same impulse and desires as you.” Let's find out.👉
11./ Robin Maugham was a well-regarded novelist but his memoir openly acknowledged his life-long pursuit of boys. He travelled to an oasis in Egypt when he was told local bachelors were allowed to chase prepubescent boys...and rxpe them. He's not the only scumbag on Fry's list.
12./ The French playwright Henry de Montherlant wasn't just an arch misogynist and an advocate of collaboration with the Nazis he ruthlessly and violently predated on young boys. He compared his visits to Algeria to rxpe boys to ....hunting for animals.
13./ French writer Roger Peyrefitte was a friend of Montherlant. They hunted boys together. Fry may have been unaware of his pederasty despite the fact Peyrefitte was completely open about it. 'Notre Amour' published in 1967 is an account of his "relationship" with a 14 year old.
14./ He would later admit the boy was 12 when he began abusing him sexually. The French literary Establishment showered awards on him. Of course they did. I won't go through all of Fry's list of allegedly inspiring "queer" icons. The last one for now is Angus Stewart. Who he?
15./ In 'Tangier: A Writer's Notebook' it soon becomes clear Stewart's penchant is for boys aged 11. Even if somehow a 16 year old Fry mistakenly thought the likes of Stewart were inspirational it beggars belief a 51 year old Fry in 2009 would continue to applaud these predators.
16./ And yet Fry did applaud them and has never to my knowledge uttered a word of criticism about any of the predators in his rogue's gallery of a list. Indeed he went further, saying, "those same names are still so close to the surface of my mind nearly four decades later".
17./ What's the connection between Fry's knighthood and the rxpe gang scandal? Like Pakistani Muslims Fry is a member of a group our institutions too often consider immune from criticism: gay men. Calling out his attitude to abuse might have seemed homophobic. But it isn't.
18./ As a gay man who experienced grooming as a schoolboy (my teacher was eventually jailed) it infuriates me that prominent gay men like Fry can minimise, joke about and even it would seem celebrate child abusers as "inspirational". This is not in the best interests of gay men.
19./ If a culture of immunity develops where some gay men -like some predatory Pakistani Muslim men- begin to think no one will dare to criticise them that can only embolden others who don't just hold dodgy views like Fry but indulge in dodgy real-world behaviour.
20./ The UK has seen fit to honour a man who sexualises adolescent boys in his fiction, frequently minimises the horrors of abuse and writes approvingly of notorious child rxpists. That reveals just how much our Establishment really cares about child exploitation. It doesn't.
21./ If you want to read the full story of Fry's shocking views and how they connect to the long and tawdry failure by the gay movement to properly address the behaviour of its historical icons like Oscar Wilde then click on the link in my bio. 👆👆👆
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