A REVIEW OF
DANCING WITH FINN BY FRANK DEMELZI

Dancing with Finn: Boy Stories is a collection of short stories by Dutch writer Frank Demelzi translated from Dutch into English by C. Caunter and published by Arcadian Dreams in London in 2024.

The forgotten emotional lives of boys, and of boysexual men
by Diogenes, 20 November 2024

Each of the stories in this volume succeeds in conveying emotional truths that have now been airbrushed by contemporary hegemonic Western ideology – truths about the sexuality and emotional life of adolescent boys, truths about the emotional life of boysexual men, and truths about how boys related to men before Anglo values spread their tentacles around the world. Most of the stories have made a lasting impression on me, and I am very glad to have read them. From the fact that the protagonist in each story seems to be the same person at different stages of his life, I assume that the stories are largely autobiographical, or at least built on autobiographical events. The translation, so far as I can judge, is superb, the prose always flowing nicely and the text as a whole very readable.

None of the stories in this collection is a completely straightforward tale of man-boy romance, but the title story is the one that looks closest to becoming such a tale, before it takes a swerve into quite different and (to me) unexpected territory. Set in the Berlin of the mid 1990s, in which setting the protagonist falls for a handsome boy, it conveys very well the emotions of a boysexual man, as he looks for clues that his growing love is reciprocated.

The next story, “The Arcade Prince”, describes the protagonist’s encounter with a boy he sees by chance on a short sea crossing and who responds in a quite uncomplicated fashion to the man’s interest and affection, seeing this as perfectly normal. When, however, the two of them are discovered together by the boy’s father, the latter reacts with an anger and hostility to the protagonist’s mild physical familiarities with his son that our protagonist must somehow navigate on the remainder of his mercifully short voyage.

In “Funfair from Hell”, the writer revisits old memories about how, as a young boy (more attracted to girls than boys, at least consciously – though he has some attraction to boys as well), he gets 'geometry lessons' from Felix, a new lodger; but these lessons quickly take a more intimate turn as the lodger gives him his first orgasms (at least, I assume they're his first), something that the boy naturally finds so thrilling that he welcomes these 'geometry lessons' with Felix and forms a close bond with him.

In “A Tiny Heart in Between” we have another developing relationship between the writer-protagonist, now an adult, and an adolescent boy called Youri. Despite not seeming to mind if the protagonist is a “paed” (showing a tolerance and open-mindedness that many an adult might learn from), he nevertheless has a certain guardedness due to a rather unpleasant experience with another man, a former boyfriend of his mother's. Slowly, however, the relationship between the two grows into something more meaningful.

“Boys on the Moon” is a beautifully written little vignette that builds up to a reflection on the mysterious nature of love.

Each of these stories gives the lie to the modern notion that a boysexual man is only interested in his own immediate sexual gratification, or interested only in boys' bodies but not in boys as persons, or that a boysexual man would simply start touching a boy intimately in the absence of a relationship of mutual trust and liking. Like a dance, the development of intimacy between two people is a mutual exchange, not something that happens all at once, physical intimacy developing with emotional intimacy. No doubt, not all relationships are like this – I am sure that psychopaths, as well as people who are just emotionally rather cold, are well represented among all sexualities. But certainly there is no reason to believe their prevalence greater among boysexual men than any other group.

The final story in this collection, “A Kiss in a Jar”, is also, at 64 pages, the longest apart from the title story, and follows the inner life of the protagonist as he approaches his fourteenth birthday. It is a wonderful, vivid and utterly authentic evocation of the emotional and sexual roller coaster of adolescence. The story also well expresses the essential fluidity of the sexuality of boys. Frank, our protagonist, is 'straight'; or at least he is sexually attracted to women. But he also finds himself attracted to Martin, his best friend, and finds himself beginning to connect with a younger boy (approaching his ninth birthday) who has just joined his scout group. Each of his relationships necessarily has a different tone and quality. However, Frank's attempt to navigate the emotional terrain of adolescence is thwarted by the sexual taboos of the adults around him – his parents, the parents of his best friend Martin, and a co-worker of a nurse with whom he formed a close bond when he was in hospital. When the best thing is just to leave others alone to their own lives and not interfere, we instead find the adults only too willing to crush the relationships that mean most to Frank.

In the case of the destruction of Frank's love for Martin, the immediate occasion for this is the interference of Martin's mother; but it is ultimately also due to Martin's own anxiety that he not be 'bent'. In this, the story is reminiscent of the recent film Close, by the Belgian director Lukas Dhont. The rigid sexual categories of our culture push on boys the idea that a same-sex friendship, if it has any intensity, gives them a certain sexual identity. And this notion serves to stifle the relationships that boys might otherwise have with each other. Instead, our culture has room for only one relationship for boys – with a same-age girl; though an underage boy and girl still can't have sex legally. Thus Western societies have completely failed to find any legitimate outlet for male adolescent sexuality with all its character of urgency and self-discovery.

Each reader will of course, bring to this collection his own individual tastes. The last story, “A Kiss in a Jar”, is my personal favourite of the collection, saying important things about the emotions and experiences of boys that I can relate to from my own boyhood. For me, the volume was worth reading for this story alone.