A REVIEW OF
SECRET LOVE BY WOLF VOGEL
Heimliche Liebe - Eros zwischen Knabe und Mann by Wolf Vogel was published by Jahn & Ernst in Hamburg in 1997. An anonymous translation as Secret Love: Eros between Boy and Man was posted online in 2022 and can be found here. The following review of it was published in issue 15 of Koinos magazine, Amsterdam, 3rd Quarter of 1997, pp. 9-12. The three uncaptioned images are from the same issue.
Men Report on Their Youth
Relations with Men
by John E. Luteijs
Jahn & Ernst Verlag, publishers in Hamburg, recently released a book that deserves serious attention. It is written by the journalist and photographer Wolf Vogel (born 1943, graduated as a social pedagogue), who already has a number of books to his credit one on cultural/historical considerations on pornography, and one on the battle against masturbation. He has added a new title to them: Heimliche Liebe - Eros zwischen Knabe und Mann (Secret love: Eros between boy and man). Vogel wants to reveal a part of reality that generally remains hidden - the reality of relationships of men who look back with pleasure on relations that they had with adult men when they were boys. Vogel intends this book as a counterweight to the present, entirely one-sided approach to relations between minors and adults. At the moment, these are presented not only in print media and on TV, but also in politics, by law enforcement and social workers and social scientists only in terms of perpetrators and victims.

Vogel’s book is particularly strong when he lets the men speak for themselves. Reading the stories of these men, with whom he made contact by means of newspaper adverts, brings to the reader a nuanced view of sexual contacts between youth and adults. In his introduction, Vogel writes about his own experiences as a boy and youth in Germany in the 1950s. As a boy he was fascinated with youths and men, and had his first intimate contacts with his peers at around the age of ten. Between the ages of 12 and 15 he had several sexual contacts with adult men; later, as an adult, he looks back on these with a smile. After his fifteenth birthday he turned to girls. His own sex was familiar to him, and he considered the period of sexual contacts with men and boys as closed. Vogel looks back on that time with positive feelings, and tells us how he and his wife have guided their two sons in this respect.
Subsequently Vogel allows various men to speak for themselves. The youngest of them is, at the time of the interview, 19-year-old Thomas, who had a relation in he woods with an older man between the ages of 11 and 16. Simon, now 33, married and the father of three children, speaks about his life as a hustler with humour and realism, and about the older men he encountered then, with whom he still maintains a special friendship. The relationship of the now 27-year-old Andre and Peter, now 55, is moving. Their friendship began when the boy was five and has (with some intervals when they didn't see each other) lasted all these years. The sexual relationship between Bjorn, now 32 and married for seven years, and Jan, now 45, began when the former was almost 12 and continues to this day. Bjorn wants sex only with Jan and not with other men, but under no circumstances would he give up having sex with him not even now that he is married. The most impressive is the autobiographical description of a relationship that began when the narrator was 16, with a man who was then 51. The relation began in 1966 in Italy. The man taught the still entirely inexperienced 16-year-old to know the delights of sexuality, but more than all else became his trusted friend. After his parents were divorced, the boy lived with him for a while, but still became estranged from him when as an eighteen year old he had his first sexual relation with a girl. The description of the process of separation between the man and the boy is painful to read. After the two had not seen each other for six years, they met each other again in 1977, and it was apparent how much they still cared for each other, even though things had now changed. When the older man died in 1980, he left a bequest and a ring to the younger, who by then was the father of two children. He still wears the ring to this day.
It is striking that all of the relationships the boys describe, in addition to having sex, erotic feeling and intimacy, were also, and chiefly, a source of stability, guidance, inspiration and respect and acknowledgement as persons. The relationships were the beginning of friendships which lasted for years.

Vogel also lets us see that the boy’s relations with a man are not without their problems. The problems which are discussed in the book have primarily to do with the lack of openness and trust in the world around them. The boys know about the threat from police and law enforcement authorities, and don’t want to get their friend in trouble. They also often feel their environment is threatening because they know that their parents and friends condemn such relations. Sometimes, though, the reaction is less negative. Vogel shows us that through interviews with mothers. Their reactions to their sons’ friendships with older men are characteristic and moving: the mothers display their jealousy and fear of possible molestation, but are able to conquer that when they are conscious of their own feelings and prepared to look closely at what is really happening; they note that the boys are benefiting from the friendships, and that the boys have complete freedom to get into or leave the friendships with the men. The mothers think it is important that they can trust their sons’ man-friends. They want openness, preferably with the older friend of the boy. The mothers interviewed had objections to unnecessarily protective intervention from authorities. Unfortunately, the role of the fathers is not adequately illuminated in the book.
Analytic chapters
Vogel’s book is not limited to interviews alone, but also has several analytic chapters which are less strong. Sexual relations between men and boys have been found throughout the ages, in many cultures. That is true. But Vogel bypasses the totally different meanings that these contacts are given depending on the time and setting. The ancient Greeks or society in the middle ages had totally different concepts of childhood or youth from ours now - to the extent that these categories existed as such at all. The book tells us that Romeo and Juliet were children. Perhaps they were - in our eyes, at least if you look at their nominal ages. But in their time they were considered as young adults. Perhaps the contemporary film version with Leonardo DiCaprio better carries the emotional and cultural freight of that day, than does an assertion that Romeo and Juliet were children in love, even though they were in fact not yet sixteen, and were perhaps indeed scarcely old enough to successfully engage in sexual reproduction.[1]

References to other cultures can show us that men’s desire for boys is universal. They can also show us that the relations have been found in all times. But none of that justifies them. Who knows how the boy in ancient Greece or pages in the days of knights experienced the possible sexual contacts? Whether that was positive or negative, what does that have to say for us? Intimacy, sexual acts, power, parental authority and marital bonds, masculinity, femininity - and, more than any of them alone, the nexus of all these phenomena together - are very different in each time and place. It is dangerous to go striding through history and anthropology in seven-league boots with our 20th century Western views, acting as if we were always talking about precisely the same thing.
A few answers to the question of why sexuality between men and boys is such a difficult issue today also show through in Vogel’s book: anti-sexual moralism inspired by religion and certain scientific disciplines and currently justified under the guise of child protection, homophobia, lack of understanding of youth sexuality, unrecognized jealousy on the part of parents. These social, cultural and psychological causes arise from deeper, underlying structures that obviously only barely enter into Vogel’s discussion.
Vogel also offers a couple of answers to the question of how relations between boys and men can go most smoothly: the boys and men being as open as possible with each other, and with the parents and the rest of society; a nuanced approach in law enforcement; the absolute freedom of the boys to be able to enter and leave relationships without that having any problematic consequences for them; and encouraging a nuanced understanding of relationships like these, particularly on the part of parents and the government.

Vogel also shows us that material which many understand to be child pornography is not perceived as such by the youths. Vogel is here speaking primarily of nude photos. While adults immediately think that they will expose themselves, or even face blackmail, because of nude photographs, according to him children don’t think in these terms at all. That only begins when youth begin to think abstractly and become sensitized to the argument that they could be damaged by nude photos.
Children are not afraid of that, because they themselves wouldn’t engage in such negative activities. Most children are proud to be photographed and children even often hang the photos up in their rooms.
Vogel’s book convincingly demonstrates that thinking in terms of black (abuse) and white (love) doesn’t hold true with regard to sexuality between boys and men. But it also shows us that there is a lot we still don’t know, because obviously the interviews don’t cover everything that is of importance. Each interview itself could have been a book and a half Moreover, the number of interviews is not that large, and, obviously, the journalistic approach has its limits. The book should be an impetus for new, systematic scientific investigation. But even researchers of high integrity, such as Theo Sandfort in The Netherlands and Rudiger Lautmann in Germany, are accused of promoting abuse because they have in the past published, or are publishing nuanced results from thorough research. It is to be hoped that politicians and scientists will find the courage to support unbiased research in this field. Prejudice and unnecessary fears can only be dealt with by assembling well-founded and non-dogmatic understanding, and if the will exists to take up and assimilate this knowledge. Vogel’s book is a modest yet courageous and stimulating first step and call to proceed further in this direction.
[1] This is a shabbily inaccurate representation of the known facts about Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: the latter was not yet fourteen (Act One, Scene Three), as Shakespeare says, not an unusual age for girls in Verona to marry; Romeo’s age is nowhere stated: he was a “young man” (Act Two, Scene Three), but given that all else we have to go on is the usual age of male marriage in Renaissance Italy, it is very unlikely that he was younger than his late teens. As for the nonsense that Juliet (never mind Romeo) was “scarcely old enough to successfully engage in sexual reproduction”, see Act One Scene Two, where Paris says “Younger than she are happy mothers made.” [Website footnote]
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