THE EXPERIENCE OF MATURATION: THE BLOOM OF YOUTH
BY EDWARD BRONGERSMA

“The Bloom of Youth” is the last of the five parts of “The Experience of Maturation”, the third section of “Boys and their Sexuality”, the third chapter of Loving Boys, the encyclopaedic study of Greek love by the eminent Dutch lawyer, Edward Brongersma, of which the first volume (including this) was published by Global Academic Publishers in New York in 1986.

With all these physical changes and the new hormones which begin to course through his body, a period opens up in which the boy becomes radiant in a certain characteristic way and which is rightly called his “bloom”. The “new-mown hay” fragrance of prepubertal boys gives way to the more prickly, sharper bodily odors of the adolescent. Tatius in the fourth century A.D., wrote, “The sweat of a handsome boy smells sweeter than any female perfume.^[1]

“John Davis”, an English teacher observed, “It might be as well to remark here that this may often be a time of extreme physical beauty. The boy has lost the prominent tummy and seeming outsize head of childhood, but not yet gained the unbalanced proportions of adolescence: he appears to be in a timeless drift.^[2] It is a pity, however, that this bloom, like all others, lasts such a short time.

73 When the Venetian boy Amadeo offers himself to Frederick Rolfe (”Baron Corvo”), Rolfe writes in a letter to a friend, “Amadeo is just ripe, just in his prime. I know that type so well. A year ago that day when he came to take the 3rd oar in my pupparin, he was a lanky uninteresting wafer. Since then, the work of dancing up and down planks with heavy sacks has filled him out, clothed him with most lovely pads of muscular sweet flesh, sweated his skin into rosy satin fineness and softness, made his black eyes and his strong white teeth and his mouth like blood glitter with health and vigour, and fixed his passions to the heat of a seven times heated furnace. He’ll be like this till spring, say three months more. Then some great fat cow of a girl will just open herself wide and lie quite still, and drain him dry. First, the rich bloom of him will go (…) Given a boy, a fine strong healthy boy, who does actually enjoy the love of a male with all its naked joys, who burns for it, seeks it, flings himself gleefully into the ardent strivings of it with no reserve, with utter and entire abandon, offering himself a willing sacrifice or operating in turn with equal and greedy unreservedness, is it not a fact that such a one keeps his youthful freshness and vigour infinitely longer than the ordinary lad who futters the ordinary lass from puberty on?^[3]

The Arabs had their own way of describing the boy in his bloom. Maarten Schild composes the following picture from the works of various poets: “The face is like a shining full moon, chasing darkness from the earth. He has big, dark, gazelle-like eyes, enchanting as sparkling jewels, lethal as two razor-sharp swords, intoxicating as the most heady wine, eyes that shine like the sun’s rays. His cheeks are like blooming roses, shining like scarlet coral, blushing like red blossoms, at times exquisitely adorned with a dark tâche de beauté. His teeth are pearl-white and his lips red and oh so sweet. His kisses and the moisture of his mouth are like delicious wine and sugar-sweet honey; his breath, scented like perfume, intoxicates you. His voice is soft and sweet, made still more attractive by its nasal quality and lisping. His hair is long and curly and coal-black. His neck is long and muscular and at the same time frail and vulnerable like a slender spray. Finally there are his adorable buttocks, chubby and soft like a dune, a mountain of sand.^[4]

What deep longing is revealed in the Greek myth wherein Zeus grants the request of beautiful young Endymion to put him eternally to sleep in order to preserve his youth forever and prevent him from aging into ugliness! Only at night can the moon come down and make love to him.^[5]

 

Continue to Rites of Initiation in Ethnology

^[1] Fontanié, P., Sport et homophilie. Arcadie 26, 307-308: 525-532, 1979, 528. [Author’s reference]

^[2] Toynbee, Th., Underdogs. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961, 85. [Author’s reference]

^[3] Rolfe, F. (Baron Corvo), The Venice Letters. London: Woolf, 1974, 36-37. [Author’s reference]

^[4] Schild, M., Jongens en mannen. Manuscript, 1983, 4-1. [Author’s reference]

^[5] Scholte, H., Gids voor Griekenland. Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1958, II-749. [Author’s reference]