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DEFINITIONS BY PARKER ROSSMAN

The following is Parker Rossman’s explanation of the meanings he ascribed to certain words he used in his Sexual Experience Between Men and Boys (originally published in New York in 1976).

 

Definitions

There is much disagreement even among experts in the field as to the specific meanings of many of the scholarly terms used in this book. In order to avoid possible misunderstanding or misconception of their meanings, the author has thought it advisable to draw up this brief listing. Also included in the listing are a number of slang terms whose meaning might not be readily intelligible.

adventurer pederast: The “cruising prowler” who seeks out boy prostitutes or invites sexual experience with strange boys. Even when limited to voyeurism and flirting, it is essentially promiscuous in intent.

chicken hawk: See adventurer pederast.

chicken queen: A more gay type of pederast who plays feminine roles with young adolescent boys. See gay-pederast.

efebofilia, ephebofilia: European term for pederasty.

fetish- or fantasy-pederasts: Pederasts who substitute various psychic games for actual, sex contact.

gay-homosexual: A homosexual person who is committed to an understanding of sexual relationships between consenting adults of the same sex as being normal, healthy and potentially as loving as heterosexual relationships, and who believes that his or her choice of such a gay life-style is determined by a homosexual nature which cannot or should not be changed.

gay-pederast: A gay-homosexual who seeks loving involvements with boys age 12 to 16, but generally only with boys who consider themselves gay. Of all types of pederastic relationships this type is likely to become passionate.

hebephile: Term used by Paul Gebhard in his book Sex Offenders to refer to men imprisoned for homosexual offenses against minors age 12 to 15.

homophobia: An emotional anti-homosexuality which characterizes some persons who may subconsciously be worried about homosexual tendencies in themselves. Presumably a well-adjusted person can be opposed to homosexuality without being terribly violent or emotional about it.

homosexual: (adjective) Sexual attraction or arousal by a person of one’s own sex. (noun) A person who accepts an identity and sexual life-style which involves him or her in sexual relationships with his or her own sex because persons of the opposite sex are not sexually appealing, homosexuality: Any sexual attraction, activity, or involvement with persons of the same sex.

Knabenliebe: German word for “boy-love,” sometimes used in English to suggest something more romantic or gay.

paiderastia: Ancient Greek term is used for paternal or platonic man-boy relationships which admit erotic overtones and interest in boys aged 12 to 15, but seek to sublimate the eroticism into wholesome uses. Thorkel Vanggaard (1972)[1] distinguishes between paiderastia (for the good of the boy) and pederasty (for the pleasure of the man),

pederast: Term used in this book to refer to any male above the age of eighteen who is sexually attracted to, or involved with, boys between the age of 12 (or puberty) and 16.

pederasty: The variables are so complex as to preclude any satisfactory definition of pederasty in terms of a particular sexual activity; or, on the other hand, to define it as mere temptation or sexual attraction between men and boys. We therefore use the term to encompass the whole range of sexual experience between males over age 18 and boys between puberty and age 16. A range which is playful rather than gay-homosexual, and therefore tends most often to be incidental rather than involving a life-style, which tends to be recreational sex rather than a quest for love, and which involves masculine horseplay sex rather than any feminization or feminine role-playing among males.

pedofilia: In America, and in this book, the term refers to an erotic attraction for, and sexual interest in, children below the age of puberty. In Europe the term pedofile is also used to include pederasty as discussed in this book.

“queer,” “fag,” etc.: Such terms have been used only in quotations and without precise definition in the text. For the most part, they refer to gay-homosexuals.

sensate-pederast: A man who has developed a taste for deviant sexual intercourse with boys who have had special training in erotic skills.

sex play: Any sexual activity for fun which is not essentially intended as lovemaking; determined more by attitude than behavior - that is, by the quality of playfulness. Ordinary sex play among males may consist of no more than teasing, joking, or masturbating; but it may move right on a continuum of experience into psychic games involving fantasy and the imagination, as well as into sports play (such as ejaculation contests) or wrestling and horseplay as substitute sexual activity. Or it may move into perversion (twisted, cruel sexual activity) or vice (the cultivation of degrading or excessive sensual pleasures); for example, to rape or be raped is no game, but to stimulate the imagination with talk or fantasy of raping another boy is a not uncommon type of psychic sex game.

sports-comrade pederast: A term used in this volume for the exaggeratedly-masculine man who seeks to repress and compensate for his pederastic desires through sports contact, or who seeks to express his pederastic eroticism only through mutual sexual horseplay with boys of his own type.

underground: A secret fellowship of rebels against society as it is organized.

underworld: Criminal organization or society.

 

[1] Thorkel Vanggaard, Phallos — A Symbol and Its History. New York: International Universities Press, 1972 [Author’s bibliography].

 

 

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